SA4QE 2015 - Steve Long - Watford / Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

This year I left my quotations around Watford. The first in Watford library, in the reading section, hopefully to an interested audience. The second at Cha Cha Cha cafe in Cassiobury Park, Watford. It's a cold day for anybody to be in the park but the cafe is popular with people who have time to spare. I left it on a windowsill along with various leaflets left by other people and organisations. The cake at Cha Cha Cha is great, by the way!

One wakes up in the morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesura in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath-Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simply raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion into being of the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then must it with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one’s lot.
From the book Pilgermann by Russell Hoban, 4th Feb 1925 – 13th Dec 2011.
Celebrating the anniversary of his birth in the annual SA4QE event.
#SA4QE
http://russellhoban.org/sa4qe

Pilgermann (Novel, 1983)