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.

This is as close to understanding my inaction as I’ve been able to get: the targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.

Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don’t know the rules—what to say, how to behave, what choices to make. They no longer know the shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible. Fear, panic, paralysis take over from rational thought. “Thinking straight” becomes impossible, because in the presence of violence people no longer know what “thinking straight” might be. They—we—become destabilized, even deranged. Our minds no longer know how to work.

And so that Chautauqua morning I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

An intimacy of strangers. That’s a phrase I’ve sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.

On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions karma, qismat, “destiny.”

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

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.”

One has to find life, I said. One can’t just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.

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