At one level, a motorcycle seems like a fairly basic machine: a vehicle with two wheels and a motor. But it has other dimensions. It has aspects of fantasy, legend, and inspiration. What is it that is so special about a motorcycle?
A way of flying on the ground—I know of no other sensation like it. You’re a nearly-naked rocket zooming around. Flowing through turns at bank like an airplane, but close to everything.
A horseless horse—If the automobile is the horseless carriage, then the motorcycle is the horseless horse. You’re astride it, rushing through the countryside, all beauty and speed and harmony.
A prosthetic limb for speed freaks—This is how Ewan McGregor puts it in Fastest. He said that about MotoGP bikes, but it’s just a matter of degree. Even a gentle soothing ride on a cruiser has a swooping zoomness to it.
T. E. Lawrence wrote with eloquence about riding motorcycles. One passage speaks to me about the exhilaration of riding:
When my mood gets too hot and I find myself wandering beyond control I pull out my motor-bike and hurl it top-speed through these unfit roads for hour after hour. My nerves are jaded and gone near dead, so that nothing less than hours of voluntary danger will prick them into life.
…although, unlike Lawrence, I don’t feel that my nerves are “jaded and gone near dead”. Lawrence rode fast on public roads in the days when nobody wore helmets: sadly, he died of head injuries riding his Brough Superior on a quiet English road.
On the track, in full leathers, helmet, gloves, boots, and armor, the “voluntary danger” is drastically reduced, but the exhilaration is just as great.