04-27-2017, 05:53 AM
Actually, those familiar with both the book and the motorcycles would probably tell you that it is, read today, a sobering insight into just how much has the world changed since the days of that journey.
On the one hand, he says in the book his CB77 was, with 27K on it, a "high miler". Today, it would be a bike just broken in. The bike had barely over 20 kW of power, yet it was considered to be adequate for a cross-country trip, loaded with the full camping gear and an 11-year old boy as a passenger.
On the other hand, the motorcycle as a metaphor for a system that "...functions in accordance with the laws of reason...", and consequently any malfunction of it can be diagnosed unambiguously by a finite number of simple tests that require only a modicum of logic-following ability and a few simple tools is long gone: today these things function in accordance with the laws of a digital computer, driven by software impervious to our inspection, that connects the sensor readouts and machinery actuations in a number of combinations that even its creators have no way of enumerating. In a way, to borrow from the narrative of the book, we have all become Johns and Sylvias...
Rest in peace, Robert M. Pirsig!
On the one hand, he says in the book his CB77 was, with 27K on it, a "high miler". Today, it would be a bike just broken in. The bike had barely over 20 kW of power, yet it was considered to be adequate for a cross-country trip, loaded with the full camping gear and an 11-year old boy as a passenger.
On the other hand, the motorcycle as a metaphor for a system that "...functions in accordance with the laws of reason...", and consequently any malfunction of it can be diagnosed unambiguously by a finite number of simple tests that require only a modicum of logic-following ability and a few simple tools is long gone: today these things function in accordance with the laws of a digital computer, driven by software impervious to our inspection, that connects the sensor readouts and machinery actuations in a number of combinations that even its creators have no way of enumerating. In a way, to borrow from the narrative of the book, we have all become Johns and Sylvias...
Rest in peace, Robert M. Pirsig!