Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

my novel Victory City

I thought about the apocryphal story of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon and muttering, “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky,” because as a young boy in Ohio he had heard his neighbors the Gorskys quarreling over Mr. G.’s desire for a blowjob. “When the boy next door walks on the moon, that’s when you’ll get that,” Mrs. Gorsky replied. Sadly, the story was not true, but my friend Allegra Huston had made a funny film about it.

“The Distance of the Moon,” Italo Calvino’s story in Cosmicomics

In the presence of serious injuries, your body’s privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won’t sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body—to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness—so that you can live.

Machado de Assis’s wonderful Brazilian novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,

The essays “In Good Faith” and “Is Nothing Sacred?” and the memoir Joseph Anton contain everything I have to say on those subjects.

Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon,

If This Is a Man, Primo Levi

When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness. At such a time kind words are comforting and strengthening. They make you feel that you’re not alone, that maybe you haven’t lived and worked in vain.

Protecting the rights and sensibilities of groups perceived as vulnerable would take precedence over freedom of speech, which the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti had called “the tongue set free.” This move away from First Amendment principles allowed that venerable piece of the Constitution to be co-opted by the right.

The First Amendment was now what allowed conservatives to lie, to abuse, to denigrate. It became a kind of freedom for bigotry.

A man sees his reflection and isn’t sure he recognizes himself. Who are you, he asks the figure in the mirror. Do I even know you? Will you at some point turn back into me or is this what I’m stuck with now, this wild-haired one-eyed demi-stranger? “I’m looking through you,” the Beatles sang. “Where did you go?”

I understood that if I waited until somebody said to me, “Everything’s fine now, you’re safe,” then that day would never come. The only person who could make the decision to emerge from the safety net of twenty-four-hour police protection and begin to lead a normal life once again was me.

To regret what your life has been is the true folly, I told myself, because the person doing the regretting has been shaped by the life he subsequently regrets.

I learned the first lesson of free expression—that you must take it for granted. If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free.

It is the trivia of the past that one mourns as much as greater matters (such as literary talent) when one is saying goodbye to a friend.

The Children of Gebelawi

André Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars)

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Execution of Justice,

Turkish author Pamuk, and called The New Life.

You want to be a servant. You went looking for a master or an idea that was bigger than you, and you could bow down before it. You didn’t want to be free. You wanted to submit. You still don’t get it. Only submission leads to freedom. That’s the fucking point.

“The Faith of a Rationalist,” Bertrand Russell

“Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.”

You could try to kill because you didn’t know how to laugh.

art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art, as Flaubert told us in Bouvard and Pécuchet. Clichés are received ideas and so are ideologies, both those which depend on the sanction of invisible sky gods and those which do not. Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.

How are we today? Where do things stand right now? What would be good to do today, okay to do again, and if so how would we go about doing it, and with whom? What sort of thing should we hold off doing until our instincts said otherwise?

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Franz Kafka’s The Castle,

Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars, we can join in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own to them.