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.

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.

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.

But now, looking back, hearing my broken voice insist on those things, the things of my normal everyday life, I think that a part of me—some battling part deep within—simply had no plan to die, and fully intended to use those keys and cards again, in the future, on whose existence that inner part of me was insisting with all the will it possessed. Some part of me whispering, Live. Live.

As for me, I had a good life, two wonderful sons, work I loved, dear friends, a beautiful home, enough money. The bad old days were far behind me. I loved New York. There was nothing wrong with this picture. Nothing missing from it. It didn’t need another figure in the landscape, another person—a companion, a lover—to complete it. It was already more than enough.

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.”

“Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches.”

When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness.

I wasn’t well enough to take in clearly the scale of what was happening outside my hospital room, but I felt it. I have always believed that love is a force, that in its most potent form it can move mountains. It can change the world.

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

After the angel of death, the angel of life.

And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it.

The idea came to him [Nietzsche] of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.”…Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life.

You can’t revise what happens. There are no second drafts. This was what he meant by the “unbearable lightness of being,” which, he once said, could be the title of every book he ever wrote, and which could be liberating as well as unbearable.

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

(“weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning”).

“We can’t know,” she said. “We can only go and find out.”