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.

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.

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.

Eliza and I decided that we would not think in the long term. We would be grateful for each day of gravy and live it as fully as we could. We would ask ourselves each day: How are we today? Where do things stand right now? What would be good to do today, okay to do again, and if so how would we go about doing it, and with whom? What sort of thing should we hold off doing until our instincts said otherwise? Short-term-ism became our philosophy. The horizon was too far away. We couldn’t see that far.

Love, above all things, and work, of course, but there was a war to fight on many fronts—against the bigoted revisionism that sought to rewrite history, whether in New Delhi or in Florida; against the cynical powers that sought to erase the two original sins of the United States, slavery and the oppression and genocide of the continent’s original inhabitants; against fantasies of an idealized past (when exactly was America “great” in the way those red hats wanted to re-create?); against the self-harming lies that had taken Britain out of Europe. I could not sit idly by while these battles raged. In this struggle, too, I would—I had to—remain involved.

The weaponizing of Christianity in the United States has resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ongoing battle over abortion, and women’s right to choose. As I say above, the weaponizing of a kind of radical Hinduism by the current Indian leadership has led to much sectarian trouble, and even violence. And the weaponizing of Islam around the world has led directly to the terror reigns of the Taliban and the ayatollahs, to the stifling society of Saudi Arabia, to the knife attack against Naguib Mahfouz, to the assaults on free thought and the oppression of women in many Islamic states, and, to be personal, to the attack against me.

In private life, believe what you will. But in the rough-and-tumble world of politics and public life, no ideas can be ring-fenced and protected against criticism.

It’s okay. It’s good that we came. We’re together. I love you. I love you too. This was important to do.

As for myself, it took me a while to understand what was happening to me. At first I was distracted from my own feelings by setting the scene for Eliza, and worrying about her well-being. But as we stood there in the stillness I realized that a burden had lifted from me somehow, and the best word I could find for what I was feeling was lightness. A circle had been closed, and I was doing what I had hoped I could do here—I was making my peace with what had happened, making my peace with my life. I stood where I had almost been killed, wearing, I have to tell you, my new Ralph Lauren suit, and I felt…whole. “I could see that this was good for you,” Eliza said, “and that made it good for me too.”