Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

About the only fault with Ted Bishop’s account of a motorcycle journey
from Alberta to Texas is that it ends after only 260 pages. Bishop’s
graceful, lucid, often funny book skilfully moves from literary musings
to technical (more or less) points of his Ducati motorcycle.

The book begins with a prologue—“The Crash”—a horrific
rendering of a near-fatal crash along a B.C. highway that left Bishop
with his spine broken in two places. But before the reader has a chance
to digest the resulting possible physical and psychological
ramifications of this accident, Bishop moves into his preparations for
the 3,000-mile sabbatical trip from Edmonton (where he teaches
literature at the University of Alberta) to the Harry Ransom Center in
Austin, Texas—“the improbable location of the best archive in the
world of British modernist writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf,
George Bernard Shaw, and T.E. Lawrence.”

Vying with Bishop’s love for literature is his infatuation with
motorcycles in general and his Ducati in particular, and he takes as
much delight in introducing fellow bikers as he does archivists,
librarians, book collectors, and teachers. This is in large measure the
book’s success: the structure of this duality, the pleasing tensions
between bikes and books. Much as Robert Pirsig did more than 30 years
ago in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Bishop uses metaphor
to make his points. “You’re in a car,” he paraphrases Pirsig.
“When you’re on a bike you’re outside; the frame dissolves. It’s
an apt metaphor for working in the archive. There you’re outside the
frame: you read the topography of the texts as well as the linguistic
codes; you get a perceptual jolt as well as an intellectual thrill … A
road too is a text,” Bishop continues. “In a car you read the map,
but on a bike you read the road.”