Newspaper reports concerning Robert M. Pirsig

This page is part of the Pirsig Pages of the Psybertron WebLog.

This page first published 11 April 2004. Last updated 1st July 2004.


Introduction

This page includes transcripts of the following articles from St. Paul (Minnesota) newspapers, referenced by the San Joaquin Valley (California) Library Services, and obtained directly from the St. Paul Public Library Services. These were supplied by Barbara J. Pierce as hard copies from the library microfilm record. The print quality is probably not good enough for scanning and web publishing, so here I have transcribed the texts and photo captions.

I've also added two articles by Pirsig that are referred to in the other pieces.

"Writer Here Among 342 in U.S. To Get Guggenheim Grants." St. Paul (MN) Dispatch, April 12, 1974.
"Beautifully Written Work Moving on Many Levels." Kathryn Boardman, St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press, April 14, 1974.
"Local Writer Roars to Fame." Kathryn Boardman, St. Paul Dispatch, April 23, 1974.
"Author Pirsig will speak at benefit for Zen Center." St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 3, 1975.
" 'Zen' author Pirsig denounced for bigotry." Andrew M. Greeley, St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 18, 1975.
"Couple floating $60,000 home." Ella Washington (sic) (actually Warmington),  St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 17, 1975.
"World traveler taking his time." Bill Farmer, St. Paul Dispatch, October 15, 1975.
"Local successes inspire writings." P. M. Clepper, St. Paul Pioneer Press, September 19, 1976.
"Chris Pirsig, writer's son, is cremated." St. Paul Dispatch, November 19, 1979.
"Rites held for writer's slain son." St. Paul Pioneer Press, November 20, 1979.

"A Husband Without a Wife" Robert Pirsig - New York Times - Sunday Book Review - June 8, 1975.
"Cruising Blues and their Cure." Robert Pirsig, Esquire, May 1977.

Note - the highlights are mine, reflecting specific new items for my biographical research, and will be removed once incorporated in other appropriate sections. At this July 2004 update my timeline is still not updated to reflect the information contained here.


"Writer Here Among 342 in U.S. To Get Guggenheim Grants." St. Paul (MN) Dispatch, Friday April 12, 1974.

[QUOTE]

Robert M. Pirsig, 458 Otis Ave. a writer, has been awarded a 1974 Guggenheim Fellowship to continue his work, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced today.

He is one of 342 scholars, scientists and artists chosen by the foundation's selection committee from among the 2,668 applicants for the grants. He is the only Minnesota resident to receive the award.

Pirsig's first book "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" has just been published by William Morrow and Co. He is now working on a second book which continues the theme of the first - an application of a new value-centered metaphysics to current cultural problems.

The grant, effective May 1st, is for one year during which Pirsig will continue his writing. Nancy Pirsig, assistant director university relations, University of Minnesota, is Pirsig's wife.

[UNQUOTE]

Note - "a writer" "his first book" "just published" - this is a small news story before ZMM made RP a celebrity, tucked away on page 7 beside the haemorrhoid cream ad.

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"Beautifully Written Work Moving on Many Levels." Kathryn Boardman, St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press, Sunday April 14, 1974.

[QUOTE]

Robert M. Pirsig's book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is a sad, moving and hopeful book, beautifully conceived and written .....

(the rest is essentially a summary - demanding, but she liked it)

..... It defines a few mileposts that may be adapted to living in the computerized world of today. Robert Pirsig is a St Paul resident. William Morrow & Co. is the publisher.

[UNQUOTE]

Note - ZMM is the first of 6 books reviewed by Kathryn that day. The others were John Cleary's "Peter's Pence" (Pope kidnap thriller), Alfred McVey's "A Couple of Cards" (Variety club charity tribute book about humorists Eddie Schwartz and Jack Jarvis), John Pearson's "James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007" (Spoof by Ian Fleming's biographer), John D. MacDonald's "The Quick Red Fox" (Standard Travis McGee suspense novel), and Lionel Black's "The Life and Death of Peter Wade" (African political murder thriller).

In fact looking at news stories the following week, this was a pre-release copy she was reviewing. The famous George Steiner (New Yorker) review is undated in the copy to which I have access, but refers to reviewing cold also, starting with the publishers hyped blurb, so I suspect it was also during this same week.

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"Local Writer Roars to Fame." Kathryn Boardman, St. Paul Dispatch, Tuesday April 23, 1974.

[QUOTE]

Robert M. Pirsig, St. Paul writer, has roared up to literary fame on his trusty motorcycle.

Pirsig's first book, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", was published this week by Morrow to rave reviews in national magazines newspapers. The quality of the reviews and the publications would have been a stunning experience for [even] an old hand at writing. The experience is very satisfactory to the calm, quiet Pirsig who is amazed and pleased. He lives with his family at 458 Otis Ave.

While he is an instant literary figure in the book world, Pirsig's book took a great deal longer. He worked on it for two years, mostly from 2am to 6pm in his Minneapolis office before he began his regular job. The book was written this way except for the last five chapters. He wrote those in the early spring of 1972 in a two month period in which he lived and worked in a camper on the North Shore of Lake Superior. While he was putting in the 2am to 6 am stint, he went to bed about 6pm, which was hard on his family for a time. In the camper on the North Shore, he worked while there was natural sunlight because lights in the camper were not adequate. So he went to bed early then, too.

The book was sold to Morrow in January 1973. Part of it is based on a motorcycle trip made by Pirsig, then 39, and his son Chris who was 11, in the summer of 1968. During the month, the father and son traveled 5,700 miles in 12 western states. They rode up to 11 hours a day and traveled 250 to 300 miles a day. It was [as] an "uneasy rider" on his motorcycle that Pirsig began to think of working the trip into some writing he was doing.

He had planned a series of essays on the importance of quality in the technologically changed world. "The essays sounded dull, unsalable and like a preacher in an invisible pulpit," Pirsig said in an interview. "On the trip I realized that I could relate this concept directly to man through the motorcycle."

The idea was not sudden. It grew as the man and boy traveled through intense heat and mountain cold into Montana and finally to California. The book which Pirsig wrote and which is being widely acclaimed as one of the important works of this year and perhaps the decade recounts the experiences of the father and son with the elements and with each other on the long journey. between the parts of this "story", Pirsig has introduced the essays which are neither dull nor preachy in the form of Chataquas or Lectures. He also introduces a phantom character he calls Phaedrus, the man's other self, who almost ran away with the book.

Pirsig outlined the idea when he returned from the trip. He sent letters about it to 121 publishers. He received 22 positive responses. The he went to work. He wrote one complete draft and threw it away after months of work. He gave the whole project up for three months and the started again. "When I had the first chapter written for the second time I knew I was on the right path." he said. He sent it out to a few of the publishers who had expressed interest months before. But he settled on Morrow, where James Landis became his editor, supporter and friend. The book was completed. he finished product in addition to its content is a beautifully edited work. There are no typographical errors to distract the reader. To say that Pirsig is satisfied with the outcome is an understatement. But he is a quiet man who glows rather than who whoops with joy. Pirsig, his wife Nancy, and their son Ted, are practicing Zen Buddhists.

Every morning, rising early, they start the day together in their dining room. They move out the furniture and sit on cushions on the floor where they meditate in silence. Then they have tea and talk. After that they go for a long walk along the river near their home. While they have been Orientalists and have been interested in Zen Buddhism for a long time, they have been practicing this Japanese religious philosophy for three years.

The camper that went to the North Shore is parked at the back of the Pirsig home and when the excitement about the book subsides Pirsig will begin work on a second book. For this one he has a Guggenheim Foundation grant so he will not be working at his regular job. Pirsig is a professional technical writer. He prepares high level manuals that describe exactly how certain machines are built. This includes computers. While his main interest has been teaching and writing, he knows enough about computers to repair them, although not to design them.

It is interesting that his publisher will put five of the firm's six spring authors on tours to push their books. The one who is not going out on the huckster route is Robert Pirsig. Pirsig has qualities of mystery about him which the publisher wishes to preserve.

[UNQUOTE]

Note - Front page (section two) headline news this time, Kathryn is responding to other rave pre-release reviews over the weekend prior to publication, and has clearly met and interviewed RP since her initial review. "uneasy rider" is a quote from George Steiner, possibly via the RP interview. The Article was accompanied by a photograph of RP with the Bike and the book (not one I've seen anywhere before ?) Only Ted is mentioned, presumably Chris now aged almost 18 is already left home ?

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"Author Pirsig will speak at benefit for Zen Center." St. Paul Pioneer Press, Thursday April 3, 1975.

[QUOTE]

St. Paul author Robert Pirsig, 458 Otis Ave., whose book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" has been nominated for a national book award, will give an illustrated lecture at 8pm Saturday in the Children's Theater, 2400 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis.

The lecture is a benefit for the building fund of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, Minneapolis. Tickets are $10 and $15 and are on sale at the theater box office up to lecture time. There are some $5 student tickets.

The National Book Award winners will be announced April 14. Pirsig's book has won a $500 award from the Friends of Literature, Chicago. The organization will honor Pirsig and four other medal winners at a dinner May 3 at the Bismarck Hotel, Chicago.

[UNQUOTE]

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"NEED TRUTH NOT STEREOTYPES - 'Zen' author Pirsig denounced for bigotry."

Andrew M. Greeley, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Friday July 18, 1975.
Greeley, priest and sociologist, is program director of the National Opinion Research Centre at the University of Chicago.

[QUOTE]

So there isn't any bigotry left in America, eh ? Well, try this one on for size.

"I hope for his own sake, that his final choice (of a new spouse) is someone who really appreciates him for the good man he is. Preferably it should be a black, southern baptist woman, heavy boned and big breasted, domineering and authoritarian, from a childhood of poverty ... she should love him earthily and also her children and her church ..."

Astonished that anything like that could be printed in the United States of America in 1975 ? What if I tell you it is from a book review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review by Robert Pirsig, the author of the bestselling "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

You refuse to believe that such bigoted stereotypical prose would appear in the Times ? Well check the issue of June 8th.

I will admit I made on small change. Where I wrote "black, southern Baptist", Pirsig had written Eastern (sic), Polish, Roman Catholic".

That makes it different, of course ? It must be the Times, because they publsihed the review without a second though apparently. Stereotypes about Poles sell, but you don't dare say the same thing about blacks.

Pirsig is a bigot, pure and simple. He tells us that for the Catholic layman morality is external, that for Catholics the "other-directed authoritarian system of moral education" becomes the pattern of life, and that Catholics are moral weaklings by the standards of Protestantism. He prates about "church discipline" and about what happened in "parochial school to Cecilia after she defied Sister Anastasia".

Pirsig doesn't think he's a bigot, of course, and John Leonard, the editor of the Times Book Review, would deny that he published bigotry. If such things were said about blacks or Jews, it would be bigotry, but about Polish Catholics it simply happens to be the truth, doesn't it ?

Aparently Pirsig did his research in a class he once taught in which there were some Catholic students. Maybe that's where he gathered his data on the body shapes of Polish women. Can you imagine an author daring to generalize about Jews or blacks in the New York Times on the basis of a class he once taught ?

Or as a colleague said when I complained about the utter silence of the various libertarian and anti-defamation organizations on this review, "But isn't what he said about Polish Catholics true ?"

Which is like asking a black if it isn't true that blacks have a natural sense of rhythm and a peculiar smell.

Or asking a Jew if it isn't true that Jews are less honest business than other people.

There are data available, of course to refute Pirsig, but Polish Catholics should no more have to appeal to such data than blacks should have to about skin secretion or Jews about business ethics. You don't argue with bigots; you denounce them and drive them out of the mass media. If Pirsig had maligned Jews or blacks, he would never appear in the New York Times again or ever have a book published. If he can escape unscathed from such a viscious slander on Polish Catholics, the only reason is the Catholics let him get away with it.

We go through life organizing our experience around "pictures" that we carry around in the back of our heads. We cling to these pictures unself-consciously until they are blasted away. The stereotype of the big, earthy, authoritarian, morally infantile Polish woman is one of the pictures to which many of our cultural and intellectual elites are firmly attached. They are not about to give it up; and if challenged they are confused. "That's not a stereotype, that's the truth." they say.

It is time someone started the blasting.

[UNQUOTE]

Note This is a response to the review by Robert Pirsig of "One Man Hurt" by Albert Martin, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review ten days earlier on June 8, 1975.

Now I've read both, I can't help thinking Greeley missed Pirsig's heavy irony. Either way I think the article says at least as much about Greeley's own stereotypes of "smelly" blacks, and exposes what is really a religious defense against Pirsig's atheistic put down of Catholics dressed up as moralising in the national interest. I wonder what Pirsig made of it ?

Of course we all carry around schemata that colour our view of truth in the real world, and these are often built from short-hand metaphorical stereotypes. But that doesn't make them bad per se. With hindsight it looks like the mad political correctness we seem to be gradually escaping from, but I guess then racial discrimination and tensions were still very sensitive. We still need a sense of values, even Roman Catholic priests I hope.

[Back to top.]


"Booked for Passage - Couple floating $60,000 home." Ella Warmington,  St. Paul Pioneer Press, Sunday August 17, 1975.

 [QUOTE]

Best-selling author Robert Pirsig of St. Paul and his wife Nancy started out looking for a vacation home along Lake Superior. Then they decided a floating home, a sailing cruiser, would suit them better. Last Monday, Pirsig left Bayfield, Wis., in a new 32-foot boat., which the couple plan to sail around the world.

"You don't usually get to be this this footloose and fancy-free at this poi[n]t in life," said Mrs. Pirsig, 42. He is 47. "We sort of got the bug all of a sudden. We just got the boat an started learning how to sail in June," she said. "Ordinarily you are landbound when you plan a trip, and you stop at the water's edge. When you are in a boat, your whole perspective turns around, and the water becomes your world. It's exciting to think [of] being able to sail into exotic harbors."

The success of Pirsig's book, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", enabled them to buy the $60,000 cutter-rigged (it has 2 foresails) cruiser, a Westsail-32. It is broad beamed (11 feet) and is known to be a seaworthy and beautiful boat. "It is the only boat advertised by its builders as capable of sailing around the world," [Mrs.] Pirsig said, "and it will." With a 36-horsepower diesel engine and a self-steering device, the two will not have to man the tiller constantly. "We will keep watches though." Mrs. Pirsig said.

They named the boat "Aretê" a Greek word meaning excellence of [or] virtue. Mrs. Pirsig will join her husband shortly for a three-week trip through the Great Lakes. From there the sailboat will navigate the Erie Canal and the Hudson River to New York City, and then down the coast to Florida.

Mrs. Pirsig plans to quite her job as assistant director of university relations at the University of Minnesota and join her husband again for the voyage across the Atlantic. She estimates that will take six to eight weeks. The two o[f] them plan to go alone. About the only thing Mrs. Pirsig is apprehensive of is a storm at sea. "There are a lot of things you can do, though," she said. "We have storm sails which are smaller and heavier, and you can drop the sails altogether. You can also use a sea anchor."

"The trip is all very nebulous," Mrs. Pirsig said. "Going around the world is a possibility. Bob prefers to keep things very loose. We have been spending three-day weekends on the boat all summer," she said, "and you get used to the motion of the boat. You are in that framework. Towns and houses and lawns don't look desirable any nore. They just look like responsibilities and the boat looks so free."

The solitude of the trip will be attractive to both of them. "I am looking forward to it," Mrs. Pirsig said, "I have been dealing with people all my life. I have never spent much time alone - not more than a day or two. This has a terrific attraction."

During the voyage Pirsig intends to work on a second book, which he describes as "about Indians in general, their differences from whites and their different values, which are not minor but very significant." [Mrs.] Pirsig described "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". "It is basically the story of a father-and-son motorcycle trip across the continent. Compared with "Moby Dick" by New Yorker magazine, the best seller is now in paperback.

[UNQUOTE]

Note - Wow - lots of good stuff in there - detail about the boat as well as their plans as a couple - Nancy's interview basically - where did it go wrong - so many possibilities.

This period, and the immediate trip down the Hudson that became "Lila" is tinged with tremendously sad irony here, as Pirsig writes a review of a book about a divorce, and soon after the "Lila" trip, writes his Cruising Blues article, about how romantic dreams are crushed, by the reality of boredom and claustrophobia of cruising, shortly after his own separation and divorce from Nancy. I guess these events need analysing in sequence and in careful detail before drawing causal connections, but it feels a painfully private aspect of Pirsig's life in which to be prying.

[Back to top.]


"World traveler taking his time." Bill Farmer, St. Paul Dispatch, Wednesday October 15, 1975

[QUOTE]

Robert Pirsig presumably has hit salt water by now in what has to be the Guinness record for the slowest circumnavigation of the world. Pirsig, who lives at 458 Otis Ave. in St. Paul is the author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". He took off on the first leg of his trip around the world by sailboat in early August and has conquered the Great Lakes.

His wife, Nancy, reports that he called from the Hudson River last week and should be on his way to Florida via the Intercoastal Waterway. He'll leave the boat in Florida and come back to St. Paul for Christmas. Then, he and Nancy will set sail - going by way of the Pacific first.

[UNQUOTE]

Note - somewhat cynical comment from Bill Farmer. Did he make it home for Christmas. Did Lila get in the way ?

[Back to top.]


"Local successes inspire writings." P. M. Clepper, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Sunday September 19, 1976.

[QUOTE]

..... There was another novel with a seemingly unattractive title, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". It was written by Robert Pirsig working early mornings in an office on Lake Street in Minneapolis. Rarely does a novel get such a send-off. Some reviewers compared it to "Moby Dick". For a serious novel it sold surprisingly well, and probably will be required reading in college classes for years, which is a nice annuity for the author. .....

[UNQUOTE]

Note - This is a very long piece mentioning inspiring works by Minnesotan authors. Actually quite an interesting piece of work - Dante, Shakespeare and Dickens get in there too. Spookily Robert Redford gets a mention as buying the film rights - to Judith Guest's "Ordinary People" that is, not ZMM. Only she and RP get their pictures included.

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"Chris Pirsig, writer's son, is cremated." St. Paul Dispatch, Monday November 19, 1979.

[QUOTE]

Cremation services were to be held today in San Francisco for Chris Pirsig, 23, son of author Robert Pirsig, formerly of St. Paul.

Chris was stabbed to death Saturday night in San Francisco near the Zen Center where he lived. He was a student at the University of San Francisco.

....

His mother Nancy Ann James, runs the vegetarian Blue Heron Cafe in Minneapolis and is active in the Zen center there. She and Robert Pirsig were divorced several years ago.

[UNQUOTE]

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"Rites held for writer's slain son." St. Paul Pioneer Press, Tuesday November 20, 1979.

 [QUOTE]

Services were held Monday in San Francisco for Christopher Pirsig, 23, son of author Robert Pirsig, formerly of St. Paul.

Christopher, a San Francisco state student, was stabbed to death on a street corner about two blocks from his place of residence at the Zen Center. Police said robbery may have been a motive as his pockets were turned inside out and his checkbook was found on the ground near his side. His wallet was untouched however. Zen students who practice meditation in the Buddhist tradition, told authorities they would sit with the body until cremation Monday.

....

Robert has been living in England. Christopher's mother Nancy Ann James, runs the vegetarian Blue Heron Cafe in Minneapolis. She and Robert Pirsig were divorced several years ago.

Other survivors include a brother Theodore Pirsig of Seattle; grandfather Maynard Pirsig of Minneapolis; and maternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas James of Janesville, Wis.

[UNQUOTE]

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A HUSBAND WITHOUT A WIFE

"ONE MAN, HURT - A Shattering Account of the End of a Happy Marriage."
By Albert Martin. 278pp. New York: Macmillan. $8.95

A review by Robert Pirsig - New York Times - Sunday Book Review - June 8, 1975
(Robert Pirsig, author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," is now a Guggenheim Fellow writing a second book.)

 [QUOTE]

"One Man, Hurt" describes in detail the agonizing chronology of a divorce, shows the life that preceded and surrounds it, and calls for opposition to the social trends the author feels produced it. As a document of marital bliss and as an attack on feminism it backfires completely. The author's atrocious suburban banality drowns out everything else. We never get done reading how much the author loves his wife, his children, washing dishes, doing diapers, his house (a suburban one in Connecticut), his neighborhood, his job, his church, his priest, his mother and father, his mother-in-law, his father-in-law, the Little League, kid's hockey, TV, their cats and dogs. For him suburban life is some sort of continuous ceremony, a ritual he must have learned to imitate watching old Andy Hardy shows on the late-late movie on TV. Then, when his wife tells him she wants a divorce to "discover herself," he cries what is she talking about? What more can he possibly give her? Throughout the book, he never finds out.

However, if one can transcend this banal level, one can find in this book some unexpected literary merit. The author tells us how miserable he is, yet because he doesn't know how to render it properly we never see it for ourselves. But he really is miserable. As one reads on, one begins to see beneath the surface of his plastic suburban style and acquire tolerance and even sympathy for his predicament. His one saving grace begins to shine through: he is not an arrogant man. He sincerely tries to learn what is wrong, tries to change himself. He really is hurt, and he hasn't deliberately hurt anyone else to provoke it. What are the real causes? What could he have done? he asks. What can he do now? It would be an act of arrogance not to try to answer.

The first key is his pathetic clinging to the material symbols of middle-class life. This, one discovers, is a poor boy, ambitious and undoubtedly hard-working, from a Polish Roman Catholic childhood in New England. Everything he loves, down to his cats and dogs, are symbols of his upward rise from the background of his immigrant parents. Now, like Jay Gatsby and Sammy Glick before him, he sees it all turning to ashes. The central shining symbol of his own aspirations, the ballet dancer on the New York stage whom he persuaded to marry him, wants out. She sees her whole life is just a cheap symbol, like everything else in his world and she wants something more real.

She asks him to look inward, but he doesn't know what she is talking about. For them there is no inward self, only roles. He is a totally other-directed man, a result of a background he cannot change and cannot even understand. At the superficial level of his own understanding there is no difference between his New England Catholicism and his wife's Texas Methodism, but at a level he is unaware of there are very deep differences, and these, I think, are the root of it all.

I once taught a college course where I asked the class, "Is the an absolute external morality?" And I was astonished to discover that, without exception, every Catholic student said yes, and every Protestant student said no. There is a profound division here.

For the traditional Catholic layman, morality is external. The author remembers vividly the terror he felt in parochial school when he saw what happened to Cecelia after she defied Sister Anastasia. He still feels it. For him the other-directed authoritarian system of his moral education has become the pattern of his life, and we see in page after page his professed love of, and obedience to, authority. He is a system player. That is how he had to learn it. You love the system and the system loves you. Now the system is failing and he is without a clue and in terror as to why this should happen.

Protestants, including his own wife, tend to take more heed of their own consciences when coming to moral decisions. This is more true among Methodists than many other sects, more true of all, I think, among Protestants residing in the state of Texas. In fact, if there's one thing the traditional Texas Protestant knows how to do better than anything else, it's how to make up his own ornery mind about what is right and what is wrong, and keeps it made up, come hell or high water, or anything else you might want to run in front of him. Texas girls see this in their fathers and grow up unconsciously expecting to find it in every man. This, tragically, in the one thing the author cannot supply. He must run to authorities for every moral decision and every major idea in his head. And by Texas Protestant standards this makes him a moral weakling and a failure, and this, I think, is why his wife cannot love him. And there is nothing he can do about it.

Nevertheless, I think this book will provide a happy ending for its author. It is, among other things, a 278-page marital advertisement which should produce dozens, if not hundreds, of matrimonial offers. I hope, for his own sake, that his final choice is someone who really appreciates him for the good man he is. Preferably, it should be an Eastern, Polish, Roman Catholic woman, heavy-boned and big-breasted, domineering and authoritarian, from a childhood of poverty like the one he got away from by marrying the little ballet dancer from Texas. She should love him earthily, and also her children and her church discipline and the suburban life, because she finds in these things the meaning of life itself. He deserves it.

As for his divorced wife, I don't know what will happen. She has a hard life coming.

But there's a feeling, rising up from deep inner sources, that in the end, when it is all over for all of us, it will be she who goes to heaven long before he does.

[UNQUOTE]

Thanks to Rick Valence of the MoQ for tracking down and transcribing this article from microfiche in the New York Central Library.

This is the review by Pirsig which drew Greeley's accusations of bigotry in the St.Pauls Pioneer press editorial a few days later.

Again, tremendous poignancy in that Pirsig himself was to have separated from Nancy within the year, starting from the high ambitions of their round the world cruise.

[Back to top.]


Cruising Blues and Their Cure
By Robert Pirsig, Esquire, May 1977
This copy obtained by Anthony McWatt and previously published on the MoQ site.

 [QUOTE]

Their case was typical. After four years of hard labor their ocean-size trimaran was launched in Minneapolis at the head of Mississippi navigation. Six and one half months later they had brought it down the river and across the gulf to Florida to finish up final details. Then at last they were off to sail the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles and South America.

Only it didn't work out that way. Within six weeks they were through. The boat was back in Florida up for sale.

"Our feelings were mixed," they wrote their hometown paper. "Each of us had a favorite dream unfulfilled, a place he or she wanted to visit, a thing to do. And most of us felt sheepish that our 'year's escape' shrunk to eight months. Stated that way, it doesn't sound as if we got our money's worth for our four years' labor."

"But most of us had had just about all the escape we could stand; we're overdosed on vacation. Maybe we aren't quite as free spirits as we believed; each new island to visit had just a bit less than its predecessor."

"And thoughts were turning to home."

Change the point of origin to Sacramento or Cincinnati or any of thousands of places where the hope of sailing the world fills landlocked, job-locked dreamers; add thousands of couples who have saved for years to extend their weekends on the water to a retirement at sea, then sell their boats after six months; change the style and size of the boat, or the ages and backgrounds of the participants, and you have a story that is heard over and over again in cruising areas - romantic dreams of a lifetime destroyed by a psychological affliction that has probably ended the careers of more cruising sailors than all other causes together: cruising depression.

"I don't know what it was we thought we were looking for," one wife said in a St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, harbor after she and her husband had decided to put their boat up for sale and go home. "But whatever it was, we certainly haven't discovered it in sailing. It seemed that it was going to be such a dream life, but now, looking back on it, it just seems . . . oh, there have been beautiful times, of course, but mostly it's just been hard work and misery. More than we would have had if we had stayed home."

A husband said, "We find ourselves getting on each other's nerves, being cooped up like this with each other day after day. We never realized that in order to enjoy being with someone you have to have periods of separation from that person too. We sailed on weekends and short vacations for years. But living aboard isn't the same."

Statements symptomatic of cruising depression vary from person to person, but common to most are long periods of silence in a person who is normally talkative, followed by a feeling of overwhelming sadness that at first seems to have no specific cause, then, on reflection, seems to have many causes, such as:

Everything is breaking down on this boat. Everything is going to hell. Considering the number of things that could break down, the attrition is actually quite normal, but now there isn't the time or tools to make major repairs, and the costs of boatyard labor and overhead are out of sight. So now every part failure - a pump that won't work, a loose propeller shaft, a windlass that sticks - looms up as a catastrophe, and during the long hours at the helm while the problem remains unfixed, it grows larger and larger in the mind.

Money is running short. Most of the big supermarkets are too far from the boat to walk to. Marine stores seem to overcharge on everything. Money is always running short, but now that fact, which was once a challenge, is a source of despair. A serious cruising person always seems to find the money one way or another, usually by taking short-term waterfront jobs, and taking them without much resentment. His boat gives him something to work for. But now the boat itself is resented and there is nothing to work for.

The people are unfriendlier here than back home. Back home people seemed friendlier, but now cruising depression has put a scowl and a worried look on the sailor's face that makes people keep their distance.

All this is just running away from reality. You never realize how good that friendly old nine-to-five office job can be. Just little things - like everyone saying hello each morning or the supervisor stopping by to get your opinion because he really needs it. And seeing old friends and familiar neighbors and streets you've lived near all your life. Who wants to escape all that? Perhaps what cruising teaches more than anything else is an appreciation of the real world you might otherwise think of as oppressive.

This last symptom - the desire to "get back to reality" - is one I've found in almost every case of cruising depression and may be the key to the whole affliction. If one bears down on this point a little it begins to open up and reveal deeper sources of trouble.

One first has to ask where those who are depressed got the idea that cruise sailing was an escape from reality. Who ever taught them that? What exactly do they mean? Scientists and philosophers spend their entire working lives puzzling over the nature of reality, but now the depressed ones use the term freely, as though everyone should know and agree with what they mean by it.

As best I can make out, reality for them is the mode of daily living they followed before taking to the water; unlike cruise sailing, it is the one shared by the majority of the members of our culture. It usually means gainful employment in a stable economic network of some sort without too much variance from what are considered the norms and mores of society. In other words, back to the common herd.

The illogic is not hard to find. The house-car-job complex with its nine-to-five office routine is common only to a very small percentage of the earth's population and has only been common to this percentage for the last hundred years or so. If this is reality, have the millions of years that preceded our current century all been unreal?

An alternative - and better - definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components ...air...sunlight...wind...water...the motion of waves...the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike twentieth-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they are more real than the extremely transitory life-styles of the modern civilization the depressed ones want to return to.

If this is so, then it follows that those who see sailing as an escape from reality have got their understanding of both sailing and reality completely backwards. Sailing is not an escape but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning. Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, TV, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the earth and the sun and wind and stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities.

For many of the depressed ones, the real underlying source of cruising depression is that they have thought of sailing as one more civilized form of stimulation, just like movies or spectator sports, and somehow felt their boat had an obligation to keep them thrilled and entertained. But no boat can be an endless source of entertainment and should not be expected to be one.

A lot of their expectation may have come from weekend sailing, whose pleasures differ greatly from live-aboard cruising. In weekend sailing, depression seldom shows up, because the sailing is usually a relief from a monotonous workweek. The weekender gets just as depressed as the live-aboard cruiser, but he does it at home or on the job and thinks of these as the cause of the depression. When he retires to the life of cruising, he continues the mistake by thinking, Now life will be just like all those summer weekends strung end to end. And of course he is wrong.

There is no way to escape the mechanism of depression. It results from lack of a pleasant stimulus and is inevitable because the more pleasant stimuli you receive the less effective they become. If, for example, you receive an unexpected gift of money on Monday, you are elated. If the same gift is repeated on Tuesday, you are elated again but a little less so because it is a repetition of Monday's experience. On Wednesday he elation drops a little lower and on Thursday and Friday a little lower still. By Saturday you are rather accustomed to the daily gift and take it for granted. Sunday, if there is no gift, you are suddenly depressed. Your level of expectation has adjusted upward during the week and now must adjust downward.

The same is true of cruising. You can see just so any beautiful sunsets strung end on end, just so any coconut palms waving in the ocean breeze, just so many exotic moonlit tropical nights scented with oleander and frangipani, and you become adjusted. They no longer elate. The pleasant external stimulus has worn out its response and cruising depression takes over. This is the point at which boats get sold and cruising dreams are shattered forever. One can extend the high for a while by searching for new and more exciting pursuits, but sooner or later the depression mechanism must catch up with you and the longer it has been evaded the harder it hits.

It follows that the best way to defeat cruising depression is never to run from it. You must face into it, enter it when it comes, just be gloomy and enjoy the gloominess while it lasts. You can be sure that the same mechanism that makes depression unavoidable also makes future elation unavoidable. Each hour or day you remain depressed you become more and more adjusted to it until in time there is no possible way to avoid an upturn in feelings. The days you put in depressed are like money in the bank. They make the elated days possible by their contrast. You cannot have mountains without valleys and you cannot have elation without depression. Without their combined upswings and downswings, existence would be just one long tedious plateau.

When depression is seen as an unavoidable part of one's life, it becomes possible to study it with less aversion and discover that within it are all sorts of overlooked possibilities.

To begin with, depression makes you far more aware of subtleties of your surroundings. Out on a remote anchorage, the call of a wild duck during an elated period is just the call of a wild duck. But if you are depressed and your mind is empty from the down-scaling of depression, then that strange lonely sound can suddenly bring down a whole wave of awareness of empty spaces and water and sky. It sounds strange, but some of my happiest memories are of days when I was very depressed. Slow monotonous grey days at the helm, beating into a wet freezing wind. Or a three-day dead calm that left me in agonies of heat and boredom and frustration. Days when nothing seemed to go right. Nights when impending disaster was all I could think of. I think of those as "virtuous days," a strange term for them that has a meaning all its own.

Virtue here comes from childhood reading about the old days of sailing ships when young men were sent to sea to learn manliness and virtue. I remember being skeptical about this. "How could a monotonous passage across a pile of water produce virtue?" I wondered. I figured that maybe a few bad storms would scare hell out of the young men and this would make them humble and manly and virtuous and appreciative of life ever afterward, but it seemed like a dubious curriculum. There were cheaper and quicker ways to scare people than that.

Now, however, with a boat of my own and some time at sea, I begin to see the learning of virtue another way. It has something to do with the way the sea and sun and wind and sky go on and on day after day, week after week, and the boat and you have to go on with it. You must take the helm and change the sails and take sights of the stars and work out their reductions and sleep and cook and eat and repair things as they break and do most of these things in stormy weather as well as fair, depressed as well as elated, because there's no choice. You get used to it; it becomes habit-forming and produces a certain change in values. Old gear that has been through a storm or two without failure becomes more precious than it was when you bought it because you know you can trust it. The same becomes true of fellow crewmen and ultimately becomes true of things about yourself. Good first appearances count for less than they ever did, and real virtue - which comes from an ability to separate what merely looks good from what lasts and the acquisition of those characteristics in one's self - is strengthened.

But beyond this there seems to be an even deeper teaching of virtue that rises out of a slow process of self-discovery after one has gone through a number of waves of danger and depression and is no longer overwhelmingly concerned about them.

Self-discovery is as much a philosopher's imponderable as reality, but when one takes away the external stimuli of civilization during long ocean hours at the helm far from any land, and particularly on overcast nights, every cruising sailor knows that what occurs is not an evening of complete blankness. Instead comes a flow of thought drawn forth by the emptiness of the night. Occurrences of the previous day, meager as they may have been, rise and are thought about for a while, and then die away to return again later, a little less compelling, and perhaps another time even weaker, until they die away completely and are not thought of again. Then older memories appear, of a week past, a month past, of years past, and these are thought about and sometimes interrelated with new insights. A problem that has been baffling in the past is now understood quickly. New ideas for things seem to pop up from nowhere because the rigid patterns of thought that inhibited them are now weakened by emptiness and depression. Then in time these new thoughts wear town too, and the empty night dredges deeper into the subconscious to tug at, loosen and dislodge old forgotten thoughts that were repressed years ago. Old injustices that one has had to absorb, old faces now gone, ancient feelings of personal doubt, remorse, hatred and fear, are suddenly loose and at you. You must face them again and again until they die away like the thoughts preceding them. This self that one discovers is in many ways a person one would not like one's friends to know about; a person one may have been avoiding for years, full of vanity, cowardice, boredom, self-pity, laziness, blamingness, weak when he should be strong, aggressive when he should be gentle, a person who will do anything not to know these things about himself - the very same fellow who has been having problems with cruising depression all this time. I think it's in the day-after-day, week-after-week confrontation of this person that the most valuable learning of virtue takes place.

But if one will allow it time enough, the ocean itself can be one's greatest ally in dealing with this person. As one lives on the surface of the empty ocean day after day after day after day and sees it sometimes huge and dangerous, sometimes relaxed and dull, but always, in each day and week, endless in every direction, a certain understanding of one's self begins slowly to break through, reflected from the sea, or perhaps derived from it.

This is the understanding that whether you are bored or excited, depressed or elated, successful or unsuccessful, even whether you are alive or dead, all this is of absolutely no consequence whatsoever. The sea keeps telling you this with every sweep of every wave. And when you accept this understanding of yourself and agree with it and continue on anyway, then a real fullness of virtue and self-understanding arrives. And sometimes the moment of arrival is accompanied by hilarious laughter. The old reality of the sea has put cruising depression in its proper perspective at last.

[UNQUOTE]

This article is so poignant given the fact Pirsig had just divorced, having experienced his own crusing blues hard on the heels of the big romantic plans of his own and Nancy's, outlined in Nancy's interview.

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