SA4QE 2017 - Yvonne Studer - Zürich, Switzerland

I posted my contribution in the form of a Facebook status with accompanying cover photo. This is what I wrote:
Today, on 4th February 2017, would have been the American writer Russell Hoban's 92nd birthday hadn't he passed in 2011. To celebrate the day, I have chosen a quotation to post on my Facebook page, as many other Hoban fans will do too. We've been doing this since 2002 - it's an event we call the SA4QE, the Slickman A4 Quotation Event. As always, my quotation reflects what seems to be "in the air", a sentiment or mood transmitted on a special frequency.
So, what's in the air, you might ask. Well, to me, our present time resembles the early 1980s, when we seemed to be living on a ticking bomb and it wasn't certain if there would be a future. In 1980, Russell Hoban published Riddley Walker, a post-apocalyptic novel about a boy who must get his bearings in a world built on the rubble of our own civilization. 1983 saw the publication of Pilgermann, a novel about a Jewish pilgrim who meets his death in 11th century Antioch. By 1985-6, Hoban still hadn't been able to let go of images of doom while he was already searching for a story about women and men. In fact, he did find one eventually. It was published as The Medusa Frequency exactly 30 years ago, in 1987.
However, I haven't chosen a quotation from The Medusa Frequency. There would no doubt have been excellent ones from this novel, e.g. "'Fidelity is a matter of perception.... Nobody is unfaithful to the sea or the mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart." But I've used it before, and there was another one which urgently asked to be spread when I was leafing through my Hoban books. It is from one of the story fragments written in 1985-6, between Pilgermann and The Medusa Frequency. Titled "Untitled", it was first published in the collection The Moment Under the Moment in 1992.