Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

It is said that Henry James’s last words were “So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.” Death was coming at me, too, but it didn’t strike me as distinguished. It struck me as anachronistic.

A gunshot is action at a distance, but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy, a knife’s a close-up weapon, and the crimes it commits are intimate encounters. Here I am, you bastard, the knife whispers to its victim. I’ve been waiting for you. You see me? I’m right in front of your face, I’m plunging my assassin sharpness into your neck. Feel that? Here’s some more, and some more after that. I’m right here. I’m right in front of you.

I remember lying on the floor watching the pool of my blood spreading outward from my body. That’s a lot of blood, I thought. And then I thought: I’m dying. It didn’t feel dramatic, or particularly awful. It just felt probable. Yes, that was very likely what was happening. It felt matter-of-fact.

Somebody—probably a doctor—was saying, Raise his legs up. We need the blood to flow to his heart. Then there were arms lifting my legs. I was on the floor with my clothes cut off me and my legs waving in the air.

In the next months there would be many more such bodily humiliations. 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.

I am content to be judged by the books I’ve written and the life I’ve lived. Let me say this right up front: I am proud of the work I’ve done, and that very much includes The Satanic Verses. If anyone’s looking for remorse, you can stop reading right here.

In the aftermath of her mother’s death in 2014, a seismic event in her life, and the inspiration for her fifth volume of poetry, Seeing the Body, she wanted to hold on to her mother’s version of herself. And that was “Eliza.” That’s what her mother had often called her and so it was who she wanted to be, and was in the process of becoming.

I wanted my Henry to suffer from happiness the way people suffer from incurable diseases, or stupidity. I thought about Voltaire’s Candide and I wanted Henry to believe, Candide-fashion, that he lived in the best of all possible worlds. I thought, he can’t possibly be a person of color if he’s happy in that way. He had to be white.

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.

In India, privacy is a luxury of the rich. The poor, living in small, overcrowded spaces, are never alone. Many impoverished Indians have to perform the most private of acts, their natural bodily functions, out of doors. To have a room of one’s own, one must have money.

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

Many people said they were praying for me. Even though they knew I was a godless bastard.

I have always believed that love is a force, that in its most potent form it can move mountains. It can change the world.

But, as Saleem Sinai’s parents repeatedly told him during his childhood in Midnight’s Children (and as mine told me), “What can’t be cured must be endured.”

If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free. When I was making The Satanic Verses, it never occurred to me to be afraid.)

The thumb and index finger were fine; the little finger had improved feeling; the other two—not so much. But what was called “protective feeling” had returned even to those fingers. I could feel heat, so I wouldn’t burn myself, and I could feel sharpness, so I wouldn’t cut myself. These were always the first feelings that returned, I was told. How intelligent the human body was, I thought, admiringly. What a wonder it is, this thing we all inhabit. What a piece of work is a man.

“If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence. And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it.

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.

Time might not heal all wounds, but it deadened the pain, and the nightmares went away.

‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”

I felt, I confess, just a little bit triumphant as I stood there. I remembered, but refrained from reciting, lines from “Invictus” by W. E. Henley. “Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.”