Having traveled from Tuva to Reykjavik, and from Scandinavia to Sicily on mountain and road bikes, I consider myself an old, advanced biker. The biker state of my body didn’t allow me to own a car, and the biker state of mind gave me some biker snobbery towards everything that was driven by a motor. Motorbikers, to their credit, have always had and showed respect for pure bikers, as Hindus do for pure brahmins. I remember the scene on the Arbat, where guys in bison leather jackets parked their Harleys in front of my 9-kilogram Wheeler: “Let's stand a little more to the right so as not to be locked up” - “This is a bi-cy-cle! He will simply pick it up and carry it away! "
For my part, I have always respected motorbikers, and even, there was a time, I wanted a motorcycle for myself. But, the fact that it cannot be lifted and carried away somehow stopped me. That is why, upon learning about the invention of electric bicycles by mankind, I did not appreciate the invention and rejected it at the level of an idea: they say, why the heck would a pure biker need a motor? So I thought, puffing and swearing, pushing my pure bike in the Chamonix mountains, watching the host of apostate biking - children, old people, pregnant women, sweep past the slope up the slope, and disappear behind the clouds. The ease with which they pedalled on 45-degree inclines indicated that, in addition to motors, some invisible powers were invisibly involved in the business. In this place, a pure Orthodox biker would have crossed himself, but an agnostic biker, inclined to question everything, decided to subject himself to an experiment ...
I am thinking now how to convey this feeling. Probably, as if the pedal drive would turn the Earth around its pedal axis. Like that. From that moment on, such an unconditional thing as gravity became a convention. And this is perhaps the main thesis, which, in principle, can be formulated in this regard.