No, this is not just another service manual, as the book title might imply. 'ZEN and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' by US author Robert M. Pirsig is a work of philosophical non-fiction, first published in 1974, at the end of the hippie era, which soon became influential and gained cult status. It represents a mixture of novel, biography and philosphical reflections about the increasingly technical American (or western) way of life during the 1950s and 1960s. This odyssey into life's fundamental questions was perfectly compatible with the counterculture that had just formed, in particular on the form of education and aims in life of the conservative post-war social classes in the US.

“In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”