Russell Hoban's naming day was cold and rainy here in White Rock BC, Canada. The pier was mostly deserted. I walked to the very end and attached this year's quote to the railing that looks out to the American San Juan Islands and the Canadian Gulf Islands.
As I walked back, a small smile of a rare kind took over my cold and wet face.
Happy Birthday Russ, and thank you.
r
In the train, Max remembers not to think out loud. People look at him and move away anyhow. "What music were we talking about?" he says to his mind.
"Hang on," says his mind. "I'm giving you a picture."
There are really only two ways out of our neighbourhood, unless you want to swim. Most often we choose the one that carries us through a path of middle-class homes with middle-class families working middle-class jobs, until they can afford to retire or sell and move to a somewhat higher-middle-class area.
It's a busy route, with cars and buses and almost always someone - or several someones - walking dogs and pushing strollers, no matter the weather or time of day. Polite nods between neighbours as they pass on the narrow sidewalks, hurrying on the way to where the other has just been.
One day we drove the familiar route only to notice that a free community library was where there hadn't been any the day before. It just... appeared.
I love this. An unexpected interruption in the business of life, that generously offers a safe place (and excuse) to pause, connect, and grow and share through the written word.
It feels like an appropriate place to flicker to, and leave a yellow A4 paper commemorating a brilliant mind who did the same for readers, and who still continues to do that through his work.
“Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.”
“More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.”
This year I thought, 'Short excerpt, bigger type', and fixed my offerings in otherwise desolate or dispiriting purlieux.
Happy Russmas, one and all.
It is a strange and frightening thing to be a human being, to partake of the mystery and madness of human consciousness.
I hope these telling lines don't throw any reader into a lasting existential pother, mind.
The tweets below, all celebrating SA4QE, were archived from 4 February 2015 by Thoughtcat. Some tweets are from the official russellhobanorg account but most are from other users who took part in SA4QE via Twitter. Scroll down within the box to see older tweets. Larger versions of some of these tweets can be seen on this page. Together with the posts on this website, these form a comprehensive record of Russell Hoban quotations shared during SA4QE 2015.
SA4QE 2015The Slickman A4 Quotation Event ("SA4QE") began in 2002 as a unique way of spreading the words of Russell Hoban. Every 4th February (Russell's birthday), fans around the world write their favourite quotations from his books on sheets of yellow A4 paper and leave them in public places, and/or share them online. Read more
"Perhaps this world that's in us, this world that we're in, was never meant to be fixed and permanent; perhaps it's only one of a continuous succession of world-ideas passing through the world-mind. And we are, all of us, the passing and impermanent perceivers of it."
Russell Hoban ~ From the Novel ‘Fremder'