Robert M. Pirsig, the author of the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, who was also an active sailor, died yesterday. Although he was a famous novelist and cult figure (which he rejected), he was also a very private man who had extensive cruising experience, including a transatlantic. Here are a few things we found:
From the New York Post obit:
"...in 1978... he married Wendy Kimball, a writer he met while sailing off the Florida coast. They crossed the Atlantic and lived aboard his boat in England, the Netherlands and Sweden before returning to the U.S. in 1985."
Interesting article from Esquire 1977
"...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."
From Bananawind.us blog:
It only made sense that when Pirsig returned from the high country of the mind, he would settle on the sea, and in 1975 he purchased a cutter rigged Westsail-32 which he christened Arête. He gave some hint of his predilection toward the sea when he wrote near the end of Zen:
Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people—what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.
The autumn voyage on which he moved his boat from Bayfield Wisconsin on Lake Superior to Florida through the Great Lakes to New York City via the Erie Canal/Mohawk River Route of the New York State Waterways and the Hudson River provides the backdrop to Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, his follow-up novel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig then cruised the U.S. Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas and the U.S. east coat before crossing the Atlantic to spend years living aboard in the England and the Scandinavian countries before returning stateside. Although he still has and sails Arête, now in his 80s, he makes his home in rural New England after having sailed, lived, and explored that great distant dream, unstopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed…the source of it all.
Pirsig's second and less successful novel, Lila, begins with a man who's been on an extended journey, now in the Hudson River, waking up next to a woman named Lila he met in a bar. More at NY Times here.
