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.

Perhaps the sliding glass door is an analogy of the coup de foudre, the thunderbolt. A metaphor of love.

However, he did not think of himself as white, because white was the color of people who didn’t think it was important to think about their color, because they

were just people; color was for other people to think about, people who weren’t just people.

There is a kind of deep happiness that prefers privacy, that flourishes out of the public eye, that does not require the validation of being known about: a happiness that is for the happy people alone, that is, just by itself, enough.

I’ll just say: we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race.

We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.

And in my view, the private faith of anyone is nobody’s business except that of the individual concerned. I have no issue with religion when it occupies this private space and doesn’t seek to impose its values on others. But when religion becomes politicized, even weaponized, then it’s everybody’s business, because of its capacity for harm.

When the faithful believe that what they believe must be forced upon others who do not believe it, or when they believe that nonbelievers should be prevented from the robust or humorous expression of their nonbelief, then there’s a problem.

God did not hand down morality to us. We created God to embody our moral instincts.