Richard Cooper 2011

This 4th February I failed to do any "proper" 4qation beyond posting this to Facebook:

Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.

- from The Medusa Frequency

My original intention was to 4qate only quotes from Angelica Lost and Found, Russ's latest novel, which I read and enjoyed over Christmas, but failed to do that either. As some might say, "Fail better!" So, unless anybody objects, my personal SA4QE contribution this year is to post my favourite quotes from that novel to this site. Here goes:

Afterwards, lying in his arms, I saw that he was crying.
'What is it, Clance?' I said, and kissed him.
'I can't describe it exactly,' he said. 'There's a great sadness come over me, what a little short thing it is to be alive and so strange. Maybe it's just the whisky.'
'No, it's the sense of loss, something lost so far back we can't remember it.'

(p83)

There is a jukebox in my head. Coloured lights, bubbles going round into vanishment and reappearing to go round again. I have no choice in what songs are played. Sometimes a lissom cheerleader inserts the coins, sometimes a tattooed truck driver; the mystic arm rises and descends with the silent disc which then blossoms into song and I dance or cry or shake my head accordingly.

(p85)

Is there a placebo effect, I wondered, for 'Everything is OK'? So if you think it is, it is? I tried it but I didn't really think it was and it wasn't.

(p93)

A first love is the one that took you to a place you never knew before, so it'll always be part of you.

(p110)

Did God invent Handel or did Handel invent God? ... 'I know that my Redeemer liveth,' sings the soprano. From what are we redeemed? Original sin? Unoriginal sin? I think uncertainty is what we are redeemed from by this redeemer whom we have invested with the power to redeem us. The extra-strength placebo. If you think it works, it will.

And, unaccountably, it does. Listening to 'Messiah' I feel redeemed.

(pp139-140)

'You don't look like a shrink,' I said.
'I charge like one though,' he said. 'What can I do for you? If anything.'
'I have a reality problem.'
'That's called life.'
'But I'm living in two realities. Maybe more.'
'And?'
'I'm trying to understand them, trying to define what they are.'
'Why?'
'So I'll know, so I can deal with them.'
'Knowing won't help. That's a waste of energy. Get practical.'
'How?'
'It doesn't matter how many realities there are or what they are; just handle them one at a time and do whatever needs to be done.'

(p163)

- all from Angelica Lost and Found