SA4QE - The Slickman A4 Quotation Event
“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.”
From Fremder (Novel, 1996) | Read more
"Trubba not"
'Do you think about fidelity sometimes?' said the head [of Orpheus].
'Sometimes.' Years after Luise had gone I found inside a copy of Rilke's Neue Gedichte her recipe for bread; I'd never seen her use a written-down recipe but there it was in her writing on a folded-up feint-ruled notebook page marking 'Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes':
1.5 kg granary flour
2 dessertsp oil
1 " salt
1 tblesp caraway seeds
2 " dried yeast
1½ pts water, bloodwarm
1 teasp sugar
Put flour in a bowl, add oil & caraway seeds. Put sugar & yeast in a jug, add a little of the warm water. Leave for 10-15 mins in a warm place to froth, add salt to warm water. When yeast dissolved, add to the flour and water. Stir, then turn on to a floured board & knead 10-15 mins until it is elastic. Put back in bowl, cover, leave to rise in warm place. When doubled in size, take out, divide into 2, knead & thump, shape into loaves and put in greased tins. Cover, leave for 10 mins in a warm place, then put in oven & bake at 220º for 40-5 mins.
The smell of the brown loaves was like fidelity.
"He was delighted to find that he did not love Gretel for any reason that he might have thought good in the past. Not for intelligence or accomplishments. Not for anything that she did. He loved her simply because she was. What a thing, thought Jachin-Boaz. Love without a purpose."
“What are World Songs?”
“My father, Go Anywhere, told me about them,” said John, “the same as his father, Whatever Works, told him. The world is made up of ideas that live in the Mind of Things but before the idea comes the song. In these songs are such things as the taste of starlight on the tongue, the colors of the running of the wolf, the sound of the raven’s blackness, the voices of blue shadows on the snow, the never-stopping stillness of sea-smoothed stones, and the memory of ancient rains that filled the oceans. Without those songs there would be no world.”
“I’ve never heard those songs,” said No Problem.
“You’ve heard them but you don’t remember them. These songs are heard only by children in the belly — that’s why they come out into the world — the songs are so powerful and enticing. Once the children have the actual world in front of them they forget the songs, it would be too sad to remember them — the children would die of sadness because the world has so many bad things in it that aren’t in the songs, only soonchildren hear these songs, no one else.”
Russell Hoban, Soonchild, WHAT SOONCHILD TOLD JOHN, page 23-23, Candlewick Press (2012)
From Soonchild (Novel, 2012) | Read more
Holding on to the world is mostly an act of faith: you see a little bit of it front of you and you believe in the rest of it both in time and space. If you're scheduled for a jump to Hubble on Tuesday you believe in you, in Hubble, in the jump, and in Tuesday. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe all of it.
From Fremder (Novel, 1996) | Read more
I don't know what I am now. A whispering out of the dust. Dried blood on a sword and the sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world, still I have something to say, how could it be otherwise, nothing comes to an end, the action never stops, it only changes, the ringing of the steel is sung in the stillness of the stone.
".....still I am of the world, still I have something to say, how could it be otherwise, nothing comes to an end, the action never stops, it only changes...."
