Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

There were no rules anymore. And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen. Old friends could become new enemies and traditional enemies could be your new besties or even lovers. It was no longer possible to predict the weather, or the likelihood of war, or the outcome of elections. A woman might fall in love with a piglet, or a man start living with an owl.

If Quichotte had been driven mad by his desire for the people behind the TV screen, then he, Brother, had perhaps also been deranged by proximity to another veiled reality, in which nothing was reliable, treachery was everywhere, identities were slippery and mutable, democracy was corruptible, the two-faced double agent and the three-faced triple agent were everyday monsters, love placed the loved one in danger, allies could not be trusted, information was as often fool’s gold as golden, and patriotism was a virtue for which there would never be any recognition or reward.

What is a man compared to the love between soul sisters? He is a passing shadow. He is a random sneeze. He is a short rain shower on a sunny day.

Such broken families may be our best available lenses through which to view this broken world. And inside the broken families are broken people, broken by loss, poverty, maltreatment, failure, age, sickness, pain, and hatred, yet trying in spite of it all to cling to hope and love, and these broken people—we, the broken people!—may be the best mirrors of our times, shining shards that reflect the truth, wherever we travel, wherever we land, wherever we remain.

Or so, most of the time, she told herself. 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.

TO BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.

Amen

But to begin at the beginning: a long time ago, when he was just starting out in the pharma business, he had gone to India to visit family and friends and in a Bombay street an urchin was distributing business cards. He took one. “Are you alcoholic?” it read. “We can help. Call this number for liquor home delivery.”

In those days there were T-shirts, FRODO LIVES, GO GO GANDALF, he wore them all. Even then he wanted a quest. There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life. For such people the quest narrative is always attractive. It prevents them from suffering the agony of feeling what’s the word. Incoherent.

Where’s Bill Murray when you need him, that’s what they’re thinking. Maybe we need to get out of the red states, you know what I mean? What’s the nearest blue state? Maybe let’s go there.”

“In Europe,” Quichotte airily remarked, “the colors of political affiliation are reversed, and so blue is the color of conservatives, reactionaries, and capitalists, while red stands for communism, socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy.

“Now you understand unhappiness,” Quichotte said, not kindly. “Is this what you came here to learn? Learn it, then. Human life is mostly unhappiness. The only antidote to human misery is love, and it is to love that we must now rededicate ourselves. Let us go.”

When Sancho got sick of listening to “Dad” it was actually kinda great to imagine that God was in the car too. God was the Silence. Sometimes that’s what was required.

the music of the sirens and power drills, an old man tap-dancing for change, whose feet say, I used to be somebody, but his eyes say, no more, buster, no more.

“If you die and go to Hell,” the Braves fan said, “you have to change planes in Atlanta.”

“What can I tell you? He’s a crook. Or, as Michael Corleone would say: first and foremost, he’s a businessman.”

“I saw an interview on TV,” he told Sancho, “with a famous filmmaker who was asked by the sycophantic interviewer if he was happy that he would always live on in his great cinematic masterpieces. ‘No,’ the filmmaker replied, ‘I would prefer to live on in my apartment.’

The images on the screen calmed and comforted him, and felt true in a way that New York City never had. The city had always struck him as being chaotic, formless, overcrowded, harsh, and possessed of no dominant narrative line.

Cyberwar was the attack on truth by lies. It was the pollution of the real by the unreal, of fact by fiction. It was the erosion and devaluation of the empirical intellect and its replacement by confirmations of previously held prejudices.

Sexual violence against South Asian women was present wherever and whenever women tried to establish independent lives and expand the zone of their personal freedoms.

Before Google. The world before the birth of the monster the Internet became, before the age of electronically propagated hysteria, in which words have become bombs that blow up their users, and to make any public utterance is to set off a series of such explosions.

In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote-unquote free choices are legitimizing the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free. That’s what I tell them, and they are very shocked.

just as we cannot write the stories of our own deaths, which is our tragedy, to be stories whose endings can never be known, not even to ourselves, because