Eit par år sidan eg las denne no. Boka kunne like gjerne vore skrive med utgangspunkt i hifi. 
Edit: Neste boka (Lila) tok utgangspunkt i segling. Eg trur mange her inne vil setja pris på teksten Pirsig skreiv til Esquire i 1977: "Cruising Blues and Their Cure").
	
		
			
		
		
	
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Denne scena er ei av dei eg liker best (s. 60-61 i mi utgåve) 
Edit: John, ven og turkamerat med forteljaren, har problem med styret på motorsykkelen sin, ein dyr modell frå BMW. Forteljaren, derimot, har ein Honda CB77 Super Hawk (1966).
When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.
‘You’re going to have to shim those out,' I said
'What's a shim?'
'It's a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines.'
'Oh,' he said. He was getting interested. 'Good. Where do you buy them?'
'I've got some right here,' I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.
He didn't understand for a moment. Then he said, '
What, the 
can?'
'Sure,' I said, 'best shim stock in the world.'
I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.
But to my surprise he didn't see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excueses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.
As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the 
nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred-dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old 
beer can!
Ach, du liber!
Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintainance. None, now that I think of it.
...
I was going in at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim 
meant. He was seeing what the shim 
was.