A Woman of Quality Sarah Vinke, 'the Divine Sarah', and the Quest for the Origin of Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality,: The Quest for the Origin of Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality, in H...

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The Mystery The Mystique The Enigma of Sarah Vinke has only increased with time, since the brilliant beyond belief .. work of a genius, historic arrival of the 1975 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM). In ZMM, author Robert Pirsig, tells us that Sarah, in essence, asked three times Are you teaching Quality This was especially intriguing, because originally, there is no clear pattern from Sarahs life, as to why she would do this!! Not knowing Sarahs origins, Pirsig, himself initially has no idea, and offers his readers no clue as to her motivation for asking him this. ZMM becomes for author Pirsig, a vehicle by which to carry us with him on a journey of inquiry into the full meaning this very question. Are you teaching QualitySarah Vinke (1894-1978), born Sarah Winifred Jennings, plays an enormously important, indeed paramount, role in Mr Pirsigs world-famous and hugely influential book, which has since attained status as a Classic of Literature. Sarah and Pirsig were teaching colleagues when they were Professors of English Rhetoric, at Montana State College from 1959 to 1961. Sarah had been the head of the English department, and was thirty-four years older than Pirsig. A mentor relationship developed, because they were kindred souls in their supreme intellectual sensitivity to culture and to experience. And because there was also a sense in which they were both largely misfits in the proasic formal organizational structure of Montana State College, since renamed Montana State University. He [Pirsig] had asked Sarah, who long before had come by with her watering pot and put the idea of Quality in his head, where in English literature quality, as a subject, was taught. "Good heavens, I dont know, Im not an English scholar," she had said. "Im a classics scholar. My field is Greek". Is quality a part of Greek thought he had asked. Quality is every part of Greek thought," she had said, And he had thought about this