About a decade ago, a buddy and I saved up our nickles and dimes to fly to France. We were humanities majors sick and tired of never having been to France before; and despite also being broke young grad students still in the throws of the Great Recession, we decided to do something about it.
We were total tourist cliches, and we didn’t care, studiously going down the checklist of all the greatest hits of Paris, because we knew not when we would ever be there again. We were especially enthralled by the Louvre: the largest and most prestigious art museum in the world. Indeed, the Louvre was so large, it started to make us actively angry, because each time our attention was arrested by some wall-sized, fantastically-detailed masterpiece, we barely had time to soak it in before the next painting, caught our attention…and then the next, and then the next, and the next after that. It was simply too much beauty to soak in at once, and we swiftly hit our saturation point!
And there in the thick of the Italian Renaissance wing, hangs the Mona Lisa.
And my friend and I quickly determined that the Mona Lisa was going to suck.
I mean, it’s just a portrait! 30×21! It’s tiny! It’s just some lady with missing eyebrows! How could it possibly compete with this staggering array of masterpieces surrounding it?! “The Mona Lisa is only famous for being famous,” we groused, “It’s like Paris Hilton or the Kardashians of the art world or whatever.” We even briefly flirted with the idea of skipping the Mona Lisa directly. “How delicious would it be?” we whispered, “If we told all our friends back home that we flew all the way to Paris, visited the Louvre, and then skipped the Mona Lisa?”
But then, remembering that life is short and unpredictable, and not knowing if we would ever come this way again, we decided to go glance at it anyways, just to check it off the list.
It’s not hard to find the Mona Lisa; there is a perpetual crowd of tourists around it, snapping selfies and bumping into each other, all while a surly security guard keeps an eye on everyone. My friend and I rolled our eyes, elbowed our way through the throng, and were prepared, with all sincerity, so simply state, “Welp, there it is!” and then move along.
Instead we stared at it for 20 minutes.
We were still being jostled by other tourists the entire time, mind you, and still had a tight itinerary for the rest of our day, but we couldn’t keep our eyes off it. Her smile…I swear, it shifts. First it looks like she’s going to laugh at you…and then laugh with you…then like she’s going to cry…then she’s being coy, then flirtatious, and reverent, then tragic, then laughing again. I simply could not pin that smile down. Neither of us could. My friend was even more cynical than me, but even he could only muster, “Well, now that I finally look at it…” and it was the only words either of spoke the entire time.
Finally we both snapped out of it, and walked away, humbled, chastened, forced to concede: it’s a masterpiece.
The only other time I’ve had an experience like that is in a Church–when I’ve tried so long and so hard to deny that I felt the Spirit there, that it was all self-delusion and confirmation bias and wishful thinking, but again and again, I haven’t been able to deny that there was something there, in spite of every rational reason to say there wasn’t.
I live near New York City now, and my favorite thing is to explore all the plentiful art galleries in the area. I love visiting art museums for the same reason I love visiting Temples: because they are pretty much the only places left in modernity that are sincerely, unironically, trying to reach for some feeling of human transcendence, without explicitly trying to sell you something. So I keep on visiting both, for the same reason.
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Robert M. Pirsig’s best-selling, 1973 counter-culture classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is just such a delightful freak of a novel. A tongue-in-cheek, sui generis hybrid between a book-length personal essay, a metaphysical murder mystery, a travel-log, a philosophic treatise, and an actual, as-promised how-to manual on how to apply the principles of Zen Buddhism to performing preventative maintenance on your motorcycle, there is seriously no other book quite like it. I first read it in Rexburg, after a Spanish professor recommended it to me based on some forgotten comment I’d made in class. Not two hours later, an unrelated classmate asked if I’d read it, in response to a different forgotten comment I’d made in class. Sometimes I know when the universe is trying to tell me something, so I checked out a copy from the library forthwith, intending to pick my way leisurely through it during my downtime at work.
I finished it in less than a week. From start to finish, I was enthralled.
The central question haunting the narrative is the deceptive simple: What is Quality? As Pirsig himself is at pains to belabor, it’s one of those questions that seems obvious, even mundane, but is nigh-impossible to pin-down once you try to take it seriously–especially when you flip it around and ask your students these questions directly. Inevitably, they either end up using equally vague synonyms–“excellence,” “goodness,” “interesting”–that are just as impossible to define; or they resort to dismissing the entire category of Quality as “subjective.”
In the latter students are generally being generous; we all have, for example, different musical tastes–some people prefer Country, others Hip-Hop, others Rock, or K-Pop, or what have you–and by college, the vast majority of students have correctly intuited that one’s musical fandom is not a revelation of one’s moral character, but only of one’s preferences (only the hipsters are the hold-outs). Quite understandably, most students hesitate to cast aspersions on their classmates’ musical tastes by claiming one genre as innately “better” than another, and adopt a more broad-minded “live-and-let-live” approach.
You might think I’m about to draw a corollary between moral and aesthetic relativism among kids these days, but I’m not; I was being quite sincere when I said they were being generous with each other, and I meant it as a compliment. Rather, my point is to highlight how, just on a practical level, how impossible this makes it to grade essays: because if Quality is purely subjective, then when exactly am I supposed to be grading on? This is a serious question, because the five-paragraph-essay–the most overly-assigned essay genre in America–also pre-supposes that there is no such thing as Quality, that writing can be taught as a mathematical formula. Not-coincidentally, five-paragraph-essays are the most boring genre on earth: students hate writing them, instructors hate reading them, and if anyone actually becomes a good writer by practicing on them, it’s purely by accident. Ignoring Quality in writing is also how we get things like textbooks: impeccably organized, perfect grammar, following all the “rules”, yet with rare exception, an absolute chore to read. (That last example always resonates with my students).
On a higher level, there’s the fact that not one of my students actually believes Quality is subjective: a Country fan, for example, does not actually like all Country; a Rap fan does not actually like all Rap. Because some of it sucks! If you’re, say, a Punk fan, and someone says, “Hey, I heard you like Punk, so I bet you’ll like this!”, you already know you’re gonna have to grit your teeth and bare it. Even making generous allowances for varying individual tastes, we all deep down really do believe certain things are better than others.
Even when we try to deny something doesn’t have quality when it does, we can’t. Hence my experience with the Mona Lisa.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig in flashbacks is teaching freshmen English himself when he becomes obsessed with the question of Quality. It causes enough of a stir that the other faculty (understandably, I might add!) get annoyed with him, and so in chapter 19, ask him a basic question: is this undefined Quality of yours subjective or objective?
He immediately recognizes it as an absolutely vicious question; because if it’s objective, then why isn’t it detectable by scientific instruments? If it’s subjective, then doesn’t that mean it doesn’t exist, and so you should just shut up stick to the syllabi?
I won’t walk you through his absolutely dazzling process of weighing whether Quality is objective or subjective in chapter 19–poking, prodding, testing the limits of this theory–mainly because I can’t do it justice, it would require a full freewheeling classroom discussion to fully unpack it, and you would be better served just reading the book yourself anyways. For now, I just want to dwell a moment on what his solution ends up being: Quality is to be found in neither the object or the subject, but in the relationship of the two with each other.
That is, you gain Quality in your writing–or in your art, or your engineering projects, or your motorcycle maintenance, or what have you–by having a good relationship with it. That may seem deceptively simple, but there is a world of importance behind it, because charity is also based on what sort of relationship we have with each other.
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,” reads 1 Corinthians 13:13:
2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
Alms-giving and miracle-working and even martyrdom itself, if done without charity, is as a textbook or a five-paragraph-essay written without Quality–dross and chaff, fit for nothing but to be cast out. If we have not charity, we really are nothing; with the corollary being that if we do have charity, we really do have everything worth having.
Or as our own Moroni 7 of the Book of Mormon also endorses it: “And charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
46 Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail—
47 But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.
48 Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure. Amen.”