An excerpt

An excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"The underlying problems are the same.  In each case there's a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both an ability to see what "looks good" and an ability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that "good" are needed...
The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic....with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, "good" would naturally follow.  The ability to see directly what "looks good" would be ignored.
The result is rather typical of modern technology, an over-all dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be over-laid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable.  And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse.  Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony.  Put the two together  and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology:  stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes.  Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses.  Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents...Its the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style.  Quality isn't something you lay on top of sbjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree.  Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."