Excerpt from the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Parsig

I don’t know how well DeWeese knew him, and what memories he’ll expect me to share. I’ve gone through this before with others and have usually been able to gloss over awkward moments. The reward each time has been an expansion of knowledge about Phaedrus that has greatly aided further impersonation, and which over the years has supplied the bulk of the information I’ve been presenting here.
     From what fragments of memory I have, Phaedrus had a high regard for DeWeese because he didn’t understand him. For Phaedrus, failure to understand something created tremendous interest and DeWeese’s attitudes were fascinating. They seemed all haywire. Phaedrus would say something he thought was pretty funny and DeWeese would look at him in a puzzled way or else take him seriously. Other times Phaedrus would say something that was very serious and of deep concern, and DeWeese would break up laughing, as though he had cracked the cleverest joke he had ever heard.
     For example, there is the fragment of memory about a dining-room table whose edge veneer had come loose and which Phaedrus had reglued. He held the veneer in place while the glue set by wrapping a whole ball of string around the table, round and round and round.
     DeWeese saw the string and wondered what that was all about.
     “That’s my latest sculpture,” Phaedrus had said. “Don’t you think it kind of builds?”
     Instead of laughing, DeWeese looked at him with amazement, studied it for a long time and finally said, “Where did you learn all this?”
     For a second Phaedrus thought he was continuing the joke, but he was serious.
     Another time Phaedrus was upset about some failing students. Walking home with DeWeese under some trees he had commented on it and DeWeese had wondered why he took it so personally.
     “I’ve wondered too,” Phaedrus had said, and in a puzzled voice had added, “I think maybe it’s because every teacher tends to grade up students who resemble him the most. If your own writing shows neat penmanship you regard that more important in a student than if it doesn’t. If you use big words you’re going to like students who write with big words.”
     “Sure. What’s wrong with that?” DeWeese had said.
     “Well, there’s something whacky here,” Phaedrus had said, “because the students I like the most, the ones I really feel a sense of identity with, are all failing!”
     DeWeese had completely broken up with laughter at this and left Phaedrus feeling miffed. He had seen it as a kind of scientific phenomenon that might offer clues leading to new understanding, and DeWeese had just laughed.
     At first he thought DeWeese was just laughing at his unintended insult to himself. But that didn’t fit because DeWeese wasn’t a derogatory kind of person at all. Later he saw it was a kind of supertruth laugh. The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that. It was a kind of laughter that destroys tensions produced by impossible situations and Phaedrus could have used some of it because at this time he was taking things way too seriously.
     These enigmatic responses of DeWeese gave Phaedrus the idea that DeWeese had access to a huge terrain of hidden understanding. DeWeese always seemed to be concealing something. He was hiding something from him, and Phaedrus couldn’t figure out what it was.
     Then comes a strong fragment, the day when he discovered DeWeese seemed to have the same puzzled feeling about him.
     A light switch in DeWeese’s studio didn’t work and he asked Phaedrus if he knew what was wrong with it. He had a slightly embarrassed, slightly puzzled smile on his face, like the smile of an art patron talking to a painter. The patron is embarrassed to reveal how little he knows but is smiling with the expectation of learning more. Unlike the Sutherlands, who hate technology, DeWeese is so far removed from it he didn’t feel it any particular menace. DeWeese was actually a technology buff, a patron of the technologies. He didn’t understand them, but he knew what he liked, and he always enjoyed learning more.
     He had the illusion the trouble was in the wire near the bulb because immediately upon toggling the switch the light went out. If the trouble had been in the switch, he felt, there would have been a lapse of time before the trouble showed up in the bulb. Phaedrus did not argue with this, but went across the street to the hardware store, bought a switch and in a few minutes had it installed. It worked immediately, of course, leaving DeWeese puzzled and frustrated. “How did you know the trouble was in the switch?” he asked.
     “Because it worked intermittently when I jiggled the switch.”
     “Well—couldn’t it jiggle the wire?”
     “No.”
     Phaedrus’ cocksure attitude angered DeWeese and he started to argue. “How do you know all that?” he said.
     “It’s obvious.”
     “Well then, why didn’t I see it?”
     “You have to have some familiarity.”
     “Then it’s not obvious, is it?”
     DeWeese always argued from this strange perspective that made it impossible to answer him. This was the perspective that gave Phaedrus the idea DeWeese was concealing something from him. It wasn’t until the very end of his stay in Bozeman that he thought he saw, in his own analytic and methodical way, what that perspective was.

Excerpt from the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Parsig

I wake up wondering if I know we’re near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air. We’re in a beautiful old wooden room of a hotel. The sun is shining on the dark wood through the window shade, but even with the shade drawn I can sense that we’re near mountains. There’s mountain air in this room. It’s cool and moist and almost fragrant. One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade and let all that sunlight in—brilliant, cool, bright, sharp and clear.
     An urge grows to go over and push Chris up and down to bounce him awake to see all this, but out of kindness, or respect maybe, he is allowed to sleep a while longer, and so with razor and soap I go to a common washroom at the other end of a long corridor of the same dark wood, floorboards creaking all the way. In the washroom the hot water is steaming and perking in the pipes, too hot at first for shaving, but fine after I mix it with cold water.
     Through the window beyond the mirror I see there is a porch out in back, and when done go out and stand on it. It’s at a level with the tops of the trees surrounding the hotel which seem to respond to this morning air the same way I do. The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.
     Chris is soon up and Sylvia comes out of her room saying she and John have already eaten breakfast and he is out walking somewhere, but she will go with Chris and me and walk down with us to breakfast.
     We are in love with everything this morning and talk about good things all the way down a sunlit morning street to a restaurant. The eggs and hot cakes and coffee are from heaven. Slyvia and Chris talk intimately about his school and friends and personal things, while I listen and gaze through the large restaurant window at the storefront across the road. So different now from that lonely night in South Dakota. Beyond those buildings are mountains and snowfields.
     Sylvia says John has talked to someone in town about another route to Bozeman, south through Yellowstone Park.
     “South?” I say. “You mean Red Lodge?”
     “I guess so.”
     A memory comes to me of snowfields in June. “That road goes way up above the timberline.”
     “Is that bad?” Sylvia asks.
     “It’ll be cold.” In the middle of the snowfields in my mind appear the cycles and us riding on them. “But just tremendous.”
     We meet John again and it’s settled. Soon, beyond a railroad underpass, we are on a twisting blacktop through fields toward the mountains up ahead. This is a road Phaedrus used all the time, and flashes of his memory coincide everywhere. The high, dark Absaroka Range looms directly ahead.
     We are following a creek to its source. It contains water that was probably snow less than an hour ago. The stream and the road pass through green and stony fields each a little higher than before. Everything is so intense in this sunlight. Dark shadows, bright light. Dark blue sky. The sun is bright and hot when we’re in it, but when we pass under trees along the road, it’s suddenly cold.
     We play tag with a little blue Porsche along the way, passing it with a beep and being passed by it with a beep and doing this several times through fields of dark aspen and bright greens of grass and mountain shrubs. All this is remembered.
     He would use this route to get into the high country, then backpack in from the road for three or four or five days, then come back out for more food and head back in again, needing these mountains in an almost physiological way. The train of his abstractions became so long and so involved he had to have the surroundings of silence and space here to hold it straight. It was as though hours of constructions would have been shattered by the least distraction of other thought or other duty. It wasn’t like other people’s thinking, even then, before his insanity. It was at a level at which everything shifts and changes, at which institutional values and verities are gone and there is nothing but one’s own spirit to keep one going. His early failure had released him from any felt obligation to think along institutional lines and his thoughts were already independent to a degree few people are familiar with. He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time. He didn’t see these things and think this way at first, however, only later on. I’m getting way out of sequence here. This all came much later.
     At first the truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can’t make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That’s a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn’t move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull’s-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.
     To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth. He couldn’t follow any known method of procedure to uncover its cause because it was these methods and procedures that were all screwed up in the first place. So he drifted. That was all he could do.
     The drift took him into the Army, which sent him to Korea. From his memory there’s a fragment, a picture of a wall, seen from a prow of a ship, shining radiantly, like a gate of heaven, across a misty harbor. He must have valued the fragment greatly and thought about it many times because although it doesn’t fit anything else it is intense, so intense I’ve returned to it myself many times. It seems to symbolize something very important, a turning point.
     His letters from Korea are radically different from his earlier writing, indicating this same turning point. They just explode with emotion. He writes page after page about tiny details of things he sees: marketplaces, shops with sliding glass doors, slate roofs, roads, thatched huts, everything. Sometimes full of wild enthusiasm, sometimes depressed, sometimes angry, sometimes even humorous, he is like someone or some creature that has found an exit from a cage he did not even know was around him, and is wildly roaming over the countryside visually devouring everything in sight.
     Later he made friends with Korean laborers who spoke some English but wanted to learn more so that they could qualify as translators. He spent time with them after working hours and in return they took him on long weekend hikes through the hills to see their homes and friends and translate for him the way of life and thought of another culture.
     He is sitting by a footpath on a beautiful windswept hillside overlooking the Yellow Sea. The rice in the terrace below the footpath is full-grown and brown. His friends look down at the sea with him seeing islands far out from shore. They eat a picnic lunch and talk to one another and to him and the subject is ideographs and their relation to the world. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His friends nod and smile and eat the food they’ve taken from tins and say no pleasantly.
     He is confused by the nod yes and the answer no and so repeats the statement. Again comes the nod meaning yes and the answer no. That is the end of the fragment, but like the wall it’s one he thinks about many times.
     The final strong fragment from that part of the world is of a compartment of a troopship. He is on his way home. The compartment is empty and unused. He is alone on a bunk made of canvas laced to a steel frame, like a trampoline. There are five of these to a tier, tier after tier of them, completely filling the empty troop compartment.
     This is the foremost compartment of the ship and the canvas in the adjoining frames rises and falls, accompanied by elevator feelings in his stomach. He contemplates these things and a deep booming on the steel plates all around him and realizes that except for these signs there is no indication whatsoever that this entire compartment is rising massively high up into the air and then plunging down, over and over again. He wonders if it is that which is making it difficult to concentrate on the book before him, but realizes that no, the book is just hard. It’s a text on Oriental philosophy and it’s the most difficult book he’s ever read. He’s glad to be alone and bored in this empty troop compartment, otherwise he’d never get through it.
     The book states that there’s a theoretic component of man’s existence which is primarily Western (and this corresponded to Phaedrus’ laboratory past) and an esthetic component of man’s existence which is seen more strongly in the Orient (and this corresponded to Phoedrus’ Korean past) and that these never seem to meet. These terms “theoretic” and “esthetic” correspond to what Phaedrus later called classic and romantic modes of reality and probably shaped these terms in his mind more than he ever knew. The difference is that the classic reality is primarily theoretic but has its own esthetics too. The theoretic and esthetic split is between components of a single world. The classic and romantic split is between two separate worlds. The philosophy book, which is called The Meeting of East and West, by F. S. C. Northrop, suggests that greater cognizance be made of the “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” from which the theoretic arises.
     Phaedrus didn’t understand this, but after arriving in Seattle, and his discharge from the Army, he sat in his hotel room for two whole weeks, eating enormous Washington apples, and thinking, and eating more apples, and thinking some more, and then as a result of all these fragments, and thinking, returned to the University to study philosophy. His lateral drift was ended. He was actively in pursuit of of something now.

Excerpt from the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Parsig

Outside in the valley again the sky is still limited by the bluffs on either side of the river, but they are closer together and closer to us than they were this morning. The valley is narrowing as we move toward the river’s source.
     We’re also at a kind of beginning point in the things I’m discussing at which one can at last start talk about Phaedrus’ break from the mainstream of rational thought in pursuit of the ghost of rationality itself.
     There was a passage he had read and repeated to himself so many times it survives intact. It begins:

     In the temple of science are many mansions . . . and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.
     Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside. . . . If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers . . . those who have found favor with the angel . . . are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected.
     What has brought them to the temple . . . no single answer will cover . . . escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

     The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert Einstein.
     Phaedrus had finished his first year of University science at the age of fifteen. His field was already biochemistry, and he intended to specialize at the interface between the organic and inorganic worlds now known as molecular biology. He didn’t think of this as a career for his own personal advancement. He was very young and it was a kind of noble idealistic goal.

     The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.

     If Phaedrus had entered science for ambitious or utilitarian purposes it might never have occurred to him to ask questions about the nature of a scientific hypothesis as an entity in itself. But he did ask them, and was unsatisfied with the answers.
     The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly—flash!—he understands something he didn’t understand before. Until it’s tested the hypothesis isn’t truth. For the tests aren’t its source. Its source is somewhere else.
     Einstein had said:

     Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. . . . He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. . . . The supreme task . . . is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. . . .

     Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge.
     A lesser scientist than Einstein might have said, “But scientific knowledge comes from nature. Nature provides the hypotheses.” But Einstein understood that nature does not. Nature provides only experimental data.
     A lesser mind might then have said, “Well then, man provides the hypotheses.” But Einstein denied this too. “Nobody,” he said, “who has really gone into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no theoretical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles.”
     Phaedrus’ break occurred when, as a result of laboratory experience, he became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves. He had noticed again and again in his lab work that what might seem to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the hypotheses, was invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing everything down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. As he was testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It actually increased as he went along.
     At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson’s law that “The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.” It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work seemed dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have some doubts about the humor or benefits of it.
     If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!
     If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than expermental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.
     About this Einstein had said, “Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest,” and let it go at that. But to Phaedrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase “at any given moment” really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!
     But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time spans of permanence seemed completely random, he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.
     He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the twentieth century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude you are increasing the multitude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!
     What Phaedrus observed on a personal level was a phenomenon, profoundly characteristic of the history of science, which has been swept under the carpet for years. The predicted results of scientific inquiry and the actual results of scientific inquiry are diametrically opposed here, and no one seems to pay too much attention to the fact. The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phaedrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience—chaos.
     It’s possible now to look back a little and see why it’s important to talk about this person in relation to everything that’s been said before concerning the division between classic and romantic realities and the irreconcilability of the two. Unlike the multitude of romantics who are disturbed about the chaotic changes science and technology force upon the human spirit, Phaedrus, with his scientifically trained classic mind, was able to do more than just wring his hands with dismay, or run away, or condemn the whole situation broadside without offering any solutions.
     As I’ve said, he did in the end offer a number of solutions, but the problem was so deep and so formidable and complex that no one really understood the gravity of what he was resolving, and so failed to understand or misunderstood what he said.
     The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is—emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come.
     I’ve a vision of an angry continuing social crisis that no one really understands the depth of, let alone has solutions to. I see people like John and Sylvia living lost and alienated from the whole rational structure of civilized life, looking for solutions outside that structure, but finding none that are really satisfactory for long. And then I’ve a vision of Phaedrus and his lone isolated abstractions in the laboratory—actually concerned with the same crisis but starting from another point, moving in the opposite direction—and what I’m trying to do here is put it all together. It’s so big—that’s why I seem to wander sometimes.
     No one that Phaedrus talked to seemed really concerned about this phenomenon that so baffled him. They seemed to say, “We know scientific method is valid, so why ask about it?”
     Phaedrus didn’t understand this attitude, didn’t know what to do about it, and because he wasn’t a student of science for personal or utilitarian reasons, it just stopped him completely. It was as if he were contemplating that serene mountain landscape Einstein had described, and suddenly between the mountains had appeared a fissure, a gap of pure nothing. And slowly, agonizingly, to explain this gap, he had to admit that the mountains, which had seemed built for eternity, might possibly be something else . . . perhaps just figments of his own imagination. It stopped him.
     And so Phaedrus, who at the age of fifteen had finished his freshman year of science, was at the age of seventeen expelled from the University for failing grades. Immaturity and inattention to studies were given as official causes.
     There was nothing anyone could have done about it; either to prevent it or correct it. The University couldn’t have kept him on without abandoning standards completely.
     In a stunned state Phaedrus began a long series of lateral drifts that led him into a far orbit of the mind, but he eventually returned along a route we are now following, to the doors of the University itself. Tomorrow I’ll try to start on that route.

At Laurel, in sight of the mountains at last, we stop for the night. The evening breeze is cool now. It comes down off the snow. Although the sun must have disappeared behind the mountains an hour ago, there’s still good light in the sky from behind the range.
     Sylvia and John and Chris and I walk up the long main street in the gathering dusk and feel the presence of the mountains even though we talk about other things. I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.