The Golden House

by Salman Rushdie

In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.

But history is the court before which all men, even emperors and princes, finally must stand. I think of Longfellow’s paraphrase of the Roman Sextus Empiricus: The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.

‘The problem is,’ my mother said, sitting on a bench in the Gardens, ‘that while we are programmed to want ethics, the programme doesn’t tell us what right and wrong actually are. These categories are empty in the brain and require us to fill them up with what? Thought. Judgement. Stuff of this kind.’ ‘One of the general principles of human behaviour, I’ve found,’ my father added, walking up and down in front of her, ‘is that in almost every situation, everyone believes himself or herself to be right, and any opponent wrong.’ To which my mother rejoined, ‘Also we live in a time in which there is almost no agreement on any existential questions, we can’t even concur simply on what is the case, and when the nature of the real is so disputed, so must the nature of the good be.’