Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

I remembered a Doonesbury comic strip in which one character tells another: “You know, I really miss September 10th.” That sentence, speaking so tenderly as it did of lost innocence, even a lost world, had stayed with me, and now I found myself thinking, “You know, I really miss August 11.” I wanted very badly to be, once again, that carefree fellow looking up at the full moon over the lake, a writer with a new novel soon to be published, and a man in love. Was that what this return journey might conjure up? Not “closure,” but a deepened longing for an irretrievably lost past,