Just Because: 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'

Wish I could remember who John Clifford was, because that's whose name is in my copy of this book. Maybe I just got it second-hand and I never knew the guy. Anyway, I remember this being a pretty good book, and it was definitely the one to be reading a while back. The subtitle is "An Inquiry into Values." It's by Robert M. Pirsig.

Part I, Chapter 1

   I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it's this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I'm wondering what it's going to be like in the afternoon.
   In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. This highway is an old concrete two-laner that hasn't had much traffic since a four-laner went in parallel to it several years ago. When we pass a marsh the air suddenly becomes cooler. Then, when we are past, it suddenly warms up again.

   I'm happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this. We bump along the beat-up concrete between the cattails and stretches of meadow and then more cattails and marsh grass. Here and there is a stretch of open water and if you look closely you can see wild ducks at the edge of the cattails. And turtles. ... There's a red-winged backbird.
   I whack Chris's knee and point to it.
   "What!" he hollers.
   "Blackbird!"
   He says something I don't hear. "What?" I holler back.
   He grabs the back of my helmet and hollers up, "I've seen lots of those, Dad!"
   "Oh!" I holler back. Then I nod. At age eleven you don't get very impressed with red-winged blackbirds.
   You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that he doesn't have. ...