Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The narrator and Chris leave the DeWeeses’ home and begin their hike into the mountains. The trek is compared to Phaedrus’s mental journey towards discovering Quality. Phaedrus’s thoughts on Quality are then dived by the narrator into two phases. In the first phase, Phaedrus refused to define Quality, as this would have made it beholden to a set rule or placed it too squarely on one side of the romantic/classic split. In the second phase, however, Phaedrus conceded into providing a definition for Quality, thereby defining its relationship with the universe. It was the second phase that actually drove Phaedrus insane. The narrator mentions that he really only has fragments left of Phaedrus’s thoughts, and so all conclusions are based off of these fragments.

To address the problem he saw with Quality, Phaedrus gave his students assignments that were geared towards making them produce their own observations instead of mimicking memorized facts and techniques. Referring again to the true university, he decided that abolishing grades altogether might allow students to think more freely. One of his brighter students was able to write a paper on the topic of withholding grades and, though the paper was met with resistance from the students, Phaedrus decided to withhold grades and evaluate the outcome.