Same day 4:57 pm

This is after break and I want to make a record, starting now, about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

pg. 4 -- Lines 7-9

"Oh" I holler back. Then I nod. At age eleven you don't get impressed with red-winged blackbirds.

You have to get older for that.

lines 26 - 41

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. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

pp 5, 6 lines 32 - 2 (p 6)

They're not too busy to be courteous. The hereness and nowness of things is something they know all about. It's the others, the ones who moved to the cities years ago and their lost offspring, who have all but forgotten it. The discovery was a real find.

I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ``Go away, I'm looking for the truth,'' and so it goes away.

pg 6, 7 lines 38 - 3 (p. 7)

On Labor Day and Memorial Day weekends we travel for miles on these roads without seeing another vehicle, then cross a federal highway and look at cars strung bumper to bumper to the horizon. Scowling faces inside. Kids crying in the back seat. I keep wishing there were some way to tell them something but they scowl and appear to be in a hurry, and there isn't -- .

Note:
I remember that I had to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for my philosophy class. I also remember not liking the book much. I suppose I took notes here to remember the passages that spoke to me or something. Perhaps I didn't have my philosophy notebook handy.