Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? If you haven’t, you should. It’s one of my favorite books, because it makes me think, and because it was written with a lot of thought and care.
The book is autobiographical, but only sort of. It’s about a cross-country journey taken by a man and his son (and some other people) on a motorcycle. But mostly, the book is about a mental journey: the man, Robert Pirsig, explores his own past, and tries to figure out what it is that makes humans do what they do.
Mostly, the book is about quality. The word represents an abstract concept, one similar to “excellence” or perhaps “perfection.” It’s not at all a definable concept, but it’s something that he (the author) tries so hard to define that it nearly drives him crazy.
Until very recently I thought I was going to be able to use this blog to hone down my very own definition of “quality.” For a very long time, I have been looking for a way to do that. But I have finally come to the conclusion that quality is not possible to define, and difficult to strive for.
I am knitting a scarf! It’s for the needy. I am going to donate it to a homeless shelter when I am done with it. Even though I’m never going to see it when I am done making it, and even though I know there are probably many more constructive ways to spend my time (especially if I would like to help the needy), I have spent huge amounts of time trying to make it perfect. The yarn is 100% wool. I even bought myself a nice, long-lasting pair of knitting needles to make it. There are 15 stitches in each row, and even though this is my first knitting project, there is not a single missing stitch. In order to achieve this kind of quality, especially when I was knitting the first five or ten rows, I forced myself to start over repeatedly, instead of just creatively dealing with the dropped stitch.
Actually, I lied. That was the case until today, when I dropped a stitch and then decided that I had gone too far to go back. There is a point at which striving for absolute quality means that you will have to spend an infinite amount of time working on something, and then whatever it is that you are working on will never see the light of day.
So, that’s where I’m at as far as quality is concerned. Welcome to my weblog. It has actually been around for a while?two years?but for the past six months, it was broken. (Something bad happened when I attempted to upgrade from a very old version of Wordpress to the newest version.) While it was broken, I occasionally wrote posts for it in my head, and was annoyed when I was not able to translate those thoughts to my computer. Now, if my thoughts are coherent, I again have a place for them to go.
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Back a few years ago or so, there was a Philosophy club at Clarkson, it was ran by a COSI alumnus, and many COSI members were in it. They used this book as part of their discussion. I wonder if that would be something people might be interested in bring back?
Anyway, nice review of the book and I wonder if what you are doing is quality or more just trying to be perfect (or close to perfect)
Also, there is still a philosophy club at Clarkson! I am in it. Unfortunately, it meets at the same time as COSI does and it is not very well advertised. Let me know if you're ever interested in coming to a meeting.
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