SA4QE - The Slickman A4 Quotation Event
“It is a strange and frightening thing to be a human being, to partake of the mystery and madness of human consciousness.”
It is a strange and frightening thing to be a human being, to partake of the mystery and madness of human consciousness.
I have a Friend's card; I like the way they nod me through when I show it: I'm not a stranger. I always feel good in museums. I like the high ceilings and the acoustics, the footsteps and the voices, the silence over and under the footsteps and voices and the individual silences of each thing, all of them different, all of them holding a long-departed Now.
Page one? I didn't think so. Suddenly the idea of turning one's experience into a story seemed not only bizarre but perverted; the idea of such a thing as page one seemed at the very least a monstrous vanity. Where was the beginning of anything, how could I draw a line through endless cause and effrect and say, 'Here is page one' ? Well of course one was either a storyteller or one wasn't, and it looked as if I wasn't - all I could do was describe phenomena as I experienced them.
I woke up. There you are, I thought; life goes on.
“The things that matter don't necessarily make sense.”
Shakespeare didn't invent Caliban; Caliban invented Shakespeare (and Sigmund Freud, and one or two others). Caliban is one of those hungry ideas, always looking for someone to word him into being so he can have another go and maybe win Miranda this time or next time. Caliban is a necessary idea. I can imagine The Tempest without Ferdinand but not without Caliban.
‘.... “It’s one of those crazy things, like when you read in the paper that the big brains figure the world’s going to end in 150 billion years and you think, well, we’ve got a little time yet. But a week later the big brains change their estimate to 50 billion years and you pull the covers over your head and have a nervous breakdown. Imagine! No more world and nobody to remember there was ever a world.” ’
From Soonchild (Novel, 2012) | Read more
