Ok. So, where to start?

I hit the end of this section, with the narrator recounting his experience with the seed crystal that seemed to put "everything" in motion - a woman watering her flowers and inquiring whether or not he was teaching Quality to his students. And he's right - what is Quality, with a capital Q? I don't understand the lady's enigmatic statement very well, but it puts me in mind all the way back to Kant's concept of a priori, the "aspects of reality which are not supplied immediately by the senses" ( Pirsig, 130).

At first I wondered if Quality would fit into that mold, as something we know but can't immediately sense. After the above passage, the narrator then gives the example of time as something you can't hear, smell, taste, see, touch, etc, falling into the category of a priori - but is that entirely true? We watch time pass - we see it change as shadows shift and the sun goes up and down everyday, and technically, that's a sense that we perceive through sight, and can name - we gave it a name: time. It's not just intuition if we're watching light change, right?

So could Quality could be a better example of  a priori as something we can't name to any of the senses? But in some cases that wouldn't work either - if one soup tastes better than the other, and they're the same soup, it's because one was prepared in a superior way to the other, and we perceive that. But that could be relative to the person doing the tasting - one person's preferences almost never fall directly in line with someone else. Does that mean that we have to get into the concepts of truth, and truth being relative to every individual?

I feel like I'm grasping at one of so many straws.