Robert M. Pirsig and My Fall Hike to Quality
I was hiking up Börzsöny in the fall of 2001, reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the evenings and carrying its questions with me on the trail. Börzsöny is a modest mountain range in northern Hungary, covered in lush forest. Like most of my native country’s natural beauty, it’s quiet—not dramatic, but deeply atmospheric in autumn. That particular hike wasn’t about getting anywhere. The leaves had turned golden, the air and light were both sharp and clean, and I remember slowing down—feeling my breath, the texture of the path, the way the forest felt alive in its stillness.
It was during that hike that Pirsig’s central idea began to take root in me. He writes about quality not as a rating or measure, but as a lived experience. As something that arises when we give full attention to what we’re doing. Whether fixing an engine or walking through the woods, the point isn’t efficiency or achievement. It’s presence. It’s care. It’s attention to detail.
That feeling found its way into my forthcoming book, Seven Loves, through one of my two protagonists, Martin. “It feels to me like an extension of what you described as Kundera’s idea of lightness versus weightiness,” he says. “Pirsig has a more definitive view—life requires attention.”
My other protagonist, Zoe, isn’t so sure. “You mean Sabina from Kundera’s book is wrong? That lightness, that letting go is just an illusion?”
Their exchange echoes an earlier post I wrote about The Unbearable Lightness of Being—another formative book from my early years. We’re all, in some way, navigating that tension between gravity and ease. I don’t think Pirsig resolves the equation, but he certainly tilts the scale. His whole philosophy is a quiet rebellion against drift, against disengagement. He invites us to care again, even about the small things—especially the small things.
That hike in Börzsöny wasn’t extraordinary, but I remember it clearly, because I was there for it. That’s the kind of quality Pirsig was talking about. And it’s something I tried to weave into the fabric of Seven Loves: a way of looking at relationships from different angles, as an alternative to Kundera’s unresolved dichotomy. Because nothing in our lives is ever truly two-dimensional.
