Afterword

426
 his book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspectives and their
meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of
time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from
behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.
When you think about it, that's a more accurate metaphor than our present
one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past,
even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who
really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
Ten years after the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance the Ancient Greek perspective is certainly appropriate. What
sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past,
spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight.
Certainly no one could have predicted what has happened. Back then, after
121 others had turned this book down, one lone editor offered a standard
$3,000 advance. He said the book forced him to decide what he was in
publishing for, and added that although this was almost certainly the last
payment, I shouldn't be discouraged. Money wasn't the point with a book
like this.
That was true. But then came publication day, astonishing reviews, best-
seller status, magazine interviews, radio and TV interviews, movie offers,
foreign publications, endless offers to speak, and fan mail...week after week,
month after month. The letters have been full of questions: Why? How did
this happen? What is missing here? What was your motive? There's a sort of
frustrated tone. They know there's more to this book than meets the eye.
They want to hear all.
There really hasn't been any ``all'' to tell. There were no deep manipulative
ulterior motives. Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it,
that was all. But as time recedes ahead and the perspective surrounding the
book grows larger, a somewhat more detailed answer becomes possible.

427
other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more
and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep
up as a serious lifetime occupation.
This book offers another, more serious alternative to material success. It's
not so much an alternative as an expansion of the meaning of ``success'' to
something larger than just getting a good job and staying out of trouble. And
also something larger than mere freedom. It gives a positive goal to work
toward that does not confine. That is the main reason for the book's
success, I think. The whole culture happened to be looking for exactly what
this book has to offer. That is the sense in which it is a culture-bearer.
The receding Ancient Greek perspective of the past ten years has a very dark
side: Chris is dead.
He was murdered. At about 8:00 P.M. on Saturday, November 17, 1979, in
San Francisco, he left the Zen Center, where he was a student, to visit a
friend's house a block away on Haight Street.
According to witnesses, a car stopped on the street beside him and two men,
black, jumped out. One came from behind him so that Chris couldn't
escape, and grabbed his arms. The one in front of him emptied his pockets
and found nothing and became angry. He threatened Chris with a large
kitchen knife. Chris said something which the witnesses could not hear. His
assailant became angrier. Chris then said something that made him even
more furious. He jammed the knife into Chris's chest. Then the two jumped
into their car and left.
Chris leaned for a time on a parked car, trying to keep from collapsing. After
a tie staggered across the street to a lamp at the corner of Haight and

429
other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more
and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep
up as a serious lifetime occupation.
This book offers another, more serious alternative to material success. It's
not so much an alternative as an expansion of the meaning of ``success'' to
something larger than just getting a good job and staying out of trouble. And
also something larger than mere freedom. It gives a positive goal to work
toward that does not confine. That is the main reason for the book's
success, I think. The whole culture happened to be looking for exactly what
this book has to offer. That is the sense in which it is a culture-bearer.
The receding Ancient Greek perspective of the past ten years has a very dark
side: Chris is dead.
He was murdered. At about 8:00 P.M. on Saturday, November 17, 1979, in
San Francisco, he left the Zen Center, where he was a student, to visit a
friend's house a block away on Haight Street.
According to witnesses, a car stopped on the street beside him and two men,
black, jumped out. One came from behind him so that Chris couldn't
escape, and grabbed his arms. The one in front of him emptied his pockets
and found nothing and became angry. He threatened Chris with a large
kitchen knife. Chris said something which the witnesses could not hear. His
assailant became angrier. Chris then said something that made him even
more furious. He jammed the knife into Chris's chest. Then the two jumped
into their car and left.
Chris leaned for a time on a parked car, trying to keep from collapsing. After
a tie staggered across the street to a lamp at the corner of Haight and

429
which said, strangely, ``I never thought I would ever live to see my 23rd
birthday.''
His twenty-third birthday would have been in two weeks.
After his funeral we packed all his things, including a secondhand
motorcycle he had just bought, into an old pickup truck and headed back
across some of the western mountain and desert roads described in this
book. At this time of year the mountain forests and prairies were snow-
covered and alone and beautiful. By the time we reached his grandfather's
house in Minnesota we were feeling more peaceful. There in his
grandfather's attic, his things are still stored.
I tend to become taken with philosophic questions, going over them and
over them and over them again in loops that go round and round and round
until theey either produce an answeer or becomee so reepeetitic7jo(eti).7(ey)0.nd heys

430
is an old cultural habit of thinking of people as primarily something material,
as flesh and blood. As long as this idea held, there was no solution. The
oxides of Chris's flesh and blood did, of course, go up the stack at the
crematorium. But they weren't Chris.
What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object
but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of
Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and
myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and
neither of us was in complete control of.
Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the
larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it,
and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for
something to attach to and couldn't find anything. That's probably why
grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any
material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying to
hang on to its own existence by finding some new material thing to center
itself upon.

431
Then something very strange happened. I'll never forget it. As we went over
the whole decision in detail one last time, there was a kind of dissociation, as
though my wife started to recede while we sat there talking. We were
looking at each other, talking normally, but it was like those photographs of
a rocket just after launching where you see two stages start to separate from
each other in space. You think you're together and then suddenly you see
that you're not together anymore.
I said, ``Wait. Stop. Something's wrong.'' What it was, was unknown, but it
was intense and I didn't want it to continue. It was a really frightening thing,
which has since become clearer. It was the larger pattern of Chris, making
itself known at last. We reversed our decision, and now realize what a
catastrophe it would have been for us if we hadn't.
So I guess you could say, in this primitive way of looking at things, that
Chris got his airplane ticket after all. This time he's little girl named Nell and
our life is back in perspective again. The hole in the pattern is being mended.
A thousand memories of Chris will always be at hand, of course, but not a
destructive clinging to some material entity that can never be here again.
We're in Sweden now, the home of my mother's ancestors, and I'm working
on a second book which is a sequel to this one.
Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or
makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it
doesn't bother. There is always Chris's silence to compare it to. What is seen
now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the
bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on
and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still
stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these
things.

432
ooolo99ikl;i.,pyknulmmmmmmmmmm 111
(This last line is by Nell. She reached around the corner of the machine and
banged on the keys and then watched with the same gleam Chris used to
have. If the editors preserve it, it will be her first published work.)

...Robert M. Pirsig
Gothenburg, Sweden
1984

433