Description
Written for ramblers of all descriptions and pursuits, this book is the basis for what we do here at Janus. As our technological advances provide greater and greater convenience, safety, and efficiency, they have simultaneously impeded our ability to experience reality in the ways that have traditionally provided us with engagement, identity, and meaning. Even motorcyclists have become victims of this rising tide of features, power, and comfort.
Today, smaller-displacement, lightweight motorcycles are considered to be “beginner” or “budget” bikes for those who cannot handle or afford the larger, heavier, more technologically-laden machines that have come to count as “real” motorcycles. A small cadre of riders remember the joys and benefits of lightweight, simple motorcycles and understand the immediacy that such machines enjoin. This little book seeks, not for a Luddite rejection of modernity or of technology, or a “retro” nostalgia for some imaginary past, but for a recalibration of a fully human approach to reality.
The motorcycle, as a machine, is fully a product of the modern, technological society, but has the unique capacity among other machines of amplifying our embodied capacities instead of taking away from our humanity. This book is not so much a handbook for motorcyclists as a defense of the purely subjective experience of riding. That experience holds the potential for transformation for anyone interested in uncovering the reasons we move, ride, or travel at all.