Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

In death we are all yesterday’s people, trapped forever in the past tense. That was the cage into which the knife wanted to put me. Not the future. The revenant past, seeking to drag me back in time.

During those empty sleepless nights, I thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. When a knife makes the first cut in a wedding cake, it is a part of the ritual by which two people are joined together. A kitchen knife is an essential part of the creative act of cooking. A Swiss Army knife is a helper, able to perform many small but necessary tasks, such as opening a bottle of beer. Occam’s razor is a conceptual knife, a knife of theory, that cuts through a lot of bullshit by reminding us to prefer the simplest available explanations of things to more complex ones. In other words, a knife is a tool, and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral. It is the misuse of knives that is immoral. Whoa, I told myself. A hard pause. Wasn’t that the same thing as saying “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”? Was I falling into a familiar trap? No. Because a gun had only one use, one purpose. You couldn’t cut a cake with a Glock, or cook with an AR-15, or open a bottle of beer with James Bond’s favorite Walther PPK. A gun’s only way of being in the world was violence; its sole purpose was to cause damage, even to take lives, animal or human. A knife was not like a gun.

I wasn’t sure what or who the self I was trying to hear might actually be.

I learned that, through literature, I could repair myself.

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.

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.

To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art.

We are engaged in a world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality—and we need to learn how to fight it.

Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live.

So the correct answer to the question “How will this affect your writing?” is: It will affect the way my writing is read. Or not read. Or both.