"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.

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

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"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. .....

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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