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Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test.
The physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance….
… to meet and match the moment of hope.
As a New Yorker sojourning for a year on the West Coast, I thought to revisit Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, about which, on first reading, I had had passionate feelings, both positive and negative. This extravagantly praised and much beloved emblematic text of the early seventies went through 23 printings in its first 5 years and captured the rapt attention of a generation that had weathered the radicalism of the sixties but was still caught up in its issues and attempting to redefine and restructure lives in accordance with its ruptures. I am concerned here with notions of distance: both those figured and implied in the text itself and those I as critic have encountered between my own previous and current readings. One noteworthy change, for example, has been my intensified perception of irony —a perspective that depends precisely on distance. It seems intriguing to reconsider, years later, a work that stirred so much at the time of its appearance and reexamine its impact at a different point, personally and publicly.