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 Sarah’s life, as to why she would do this!! Not knowing Sarah’s 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 Quality? Sarah Vinke (1894-1978), born Sarah Winifred Jennings, plays an enormously important, indeed paramount, role in Mr Pirsig’s 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 don’t know, I’m not an English scholar, she had said. I’m 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. Sometimes under her old-ladyish way of speaking he thought he detected a secret canniness, as though like a Delphic oracle she said things with hidden meanings, but he could never be sure. Sarah’s statements prodded (provoked?) Pirsig into a deep study of Quality, and thus Sarah was the prime mover for Pirsig to eventually write ZMM. Sarah’s fame today is due to what may, in retrospect, seem a bizarre accident: that she was in the right place at the right time and as a result was lucky enough to be given immortality by the pen of a remarkably gifted writer. But the truth, very likely, is that that gifted writer was even luckier to meet Sarah. Thanks to her, the word ‘Quality’ has a resonance and meaning today that it never had previously. Quality, is Sarah’s translation of Ancient Greek Arete’ (

), meaning utter, most striving, excellence. Robert Pirsig, in discussing Quality and Sarah, said: And SHE had a sense of Quality. A brilliant teacher. They [her students] called her ‘The Divine Sarah’. . In this Sarah Vinke Biography, readers will understand the extreme importance of the ZMM book, one of the most remarkable and most thought-provoking, books ever written, and surely an immortal one. Readers will also see the absolutely vital role Sarah Vinke played in it, and just how she came to realize the full impact of the Ancient Greek Arete’ (

), and thus the key inspiration she gave author Robert Pirsig, to focus on ‘Quality.