A few excerpts culled from Chapter 1.....

     Chris and I are traveling to Montana with some friends, riding up ahead, and maybe farther than that.  Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than arrive anywhere.  We are just vacationing.  Secondary roads are preferred. ...

     I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on.  We saw it and yet we didn't see it.  Or rather we were trained not to see it.  Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland.  It was a puzzling thing.  The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. ...

In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply did deeper into old ones that have become stilted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.  "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow.  I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. ...

But there are human forces stronger than logic. ...

     I disagree with them about cycle maintenance, but not because I am out of sympathy with their feelings about technology.   I just think their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating.  The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.  To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.

-Robert Pirsig,  Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance:  An Inquiry Into Values