Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

he fell victim to that increasingly prevalent psychological disorder in which the boundary between truth and lies became smudged and indistinct, so that at times he found himself incapable of distinguishing one from the other, reality from ‘reality’, and began to think of himself as a natural citizen (and potential inhabitant) of that imaginary world beyond the screen to which he was so devoted, and which, he believed, provided him, and therefore everyone, with the moral, social and practical guidelines by which all men and women should live.

And one day the proper name to use, the best of all identities to assume, came to him in that moment between waking and sleeping when the imagined world behind our eyelids can drip its magic into the world we see when we open our eyes.

His silence was like a vacuum that sucked the secrets out of their mouths and right into his ears.

For we migrants have become like seed-spores, carried through the air, and lo, the breeze blows us where it will, until we lodge in alien soil, where very often – as for example now in this England with its wild nostalgia for an imaginary golden age when all attitudes were Anglo-Saxon and all English skins were white – we are made to feel unwelcome, no matter how beautiful the fruit hanging from the branches of the orchards of fruit trees that we grow into and become.

But the truth was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.

There was a sign if you wanted one, he thought, a gigantic starlight finger flipping the bird at the Earth, pointing out that all human aspiration was meaningless and all human achievement absurd when measured against the everything of everything. Up there was the immensity of the immensity, the endless distance of the distance, the impossible scale, the thunderous silence of all that light, the million million million blazing suns out there where nobody could hear you scream. And down here the human race, dirty ants crawling across a small rock circling a minor star in the outlying provinces of a lesser galaxy in the inconsequential boondocks of the universe, narcissistic ants mad with egotism, insisting in the face of the fiery night-sky evidence to the contrary that their puny anthills stood at the heart of it all.

the Alban Berg, the Schoenberg, the Webern, the Philip Glass, the Steve Reich,

We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.

The body fights for life until the very end. We are all death’s virgins, and we don’t easily yield up our flower.

Maybe this was the human condition, to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn’t understand it wasn’t real.

the flavour of everything was greatly heightened by the mingled pain and pleasure of knowing that something excellent was being done for the last time.

‘Is that what you believe,’ Son asked him, ‘that life is meaningless and we are turning into animals without morality?’ ‘I think it’s legitimate for a work of art made in the present time to say, we are being crippled by the culture we have made, by its most popular elements above all,’ he replied. ‘And by stupidity and ignorance and bigotry, yes.’