Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

“That is correct,” said the cricket. “È proprio vero. I’m a projection of your brain, just in the way that you started out as a projection of his. It seems you may be getting an insula.” “A what?” “As I was saying,” said the cricket, “he wants you to be fully human as badly as you do. He imagines it all the time. And to get you there, he will need to give you an insula.” “I’m talking to an Italian cricket,” Sancho said to the stars, “whose vocabulary is bigger than mine, and who apparently wants to discuss insulation.” “Insul-ah, not insul-ate,” the cricket corrected him. “This is the Latin of science. It means an island in the mind.” “He’s giving me an island?” Sancho was confused.

I love the way Rushdie has cleverly worked in and reworked the "ínsula", the island promised to Sancho in the Spanish of Cervantes' Don Quixote.

“The first valley is the valley of the quest itself,” Quichotte said. “Here the searcher has to cast aside every kind of dogma, including both belief and unbelief. Old age itself is such a valley. In old age one becomes detached from the dominant ideas of one’s time. The present, with its arguments, its quarreling ideas, is revealed as fleeting and unreal. The past is long gone and the future, one recognizes, is not a place in which one will find a foothold. To be separated from the present, past, and future is to entertain the eternal, to allow the eternal to enter one’s being.” “But if you cast aside unbelief as well as belief”—Sancho scratched his head—“then there’s nothing left. Right? All you’ve got is an empty head. That can’t be good? Can it?” “Systems of thought will not help us on our journey,” Quichotte answered. “Systems of thought, and their antitheses as well, are merely codifications of what we think we know. When we begin by abandoning them, we open ourselves to the immensity of the universe, and therefore also to immense possibilities, including the possibility of the impossible, in which category I place my quest for love.”

“Anyhow, that’s right about the universe, I get that part,” Sancho said. “The universe doesn’t have positions or theories or rebuttals or any of that. The universe is just up there, out there, all around, and it doesn’t give a fuck.” “And now we too must seek to be just there,” Quichotte replied. “And not give a fuck?” “There is no need to give a fuck,” Quichotte answered gravely, “about anything except the goal of our journey.”

“Has anybody seen the mastodons in the green suits?” asked a man in a brown suit. “It’s said they can walk on their hind legs, like human beings. I haven’t seen one myself but I’m reliably informed they exist. It’s my opinion that these are the moderate mastodons, the ones who want to make an accommodation with human beings, and we need to negotiate terms with them. Has anyone seen one?”

It was all too stylized, somehow, to be real. But Quichotte had warned him that reality as they had understood the word would now cease to exist, so maybe this theatricality was an aspect of that transformation?

“Once,” he said, “people believed that they lived in little boxes, boxes that contained their whole stories, and that there was no need to worry much about what other people were doing in their other little boxes, whether nearby or far away. Other people’s stories had nothing to do with ours. But then the world got smaller and all the boxes got pushed up against all the other boxes and opened up, and now that all the boxes are connected to all the other boxes, we have to understand what’s going on in all the boxes we aren’t in, otherwise we don’t know why the things happening in our boxes are happening. Everything is connected.”

Social media had no memory. Today’s scandal was sufficient unto itself. Sister’s lifelong commitment to anti-racism was as if it had never been. Various people styled as community leaders were ready to denounce her, as if high-volume music played late at night was an inalienable aspect of Afro-Caribbean culture and any critique of it had to be driven by prejudice, as if nobody noticed or cared that the vast majority of the young nocturnal drinkers, makers-out, and fighters were affluent and white.

But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. To have lived long enough to witness the replacement of the depth of her chosen world’s culture by its surfaces was a sad thing.

“What saved me was the date. Let’s just say, B.G., which is to say, 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. Our age, A.G., in which the mob rules, and the smartphone rules the mob. Back then the most advanced technology available was the fax machine.

He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age. He said he was trying also to write about impossible, obsessional love, father-son relationships, sibling quarrels, and yes, unforgivable things; about Indian immigrants, racism toward them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and “real” realities, the death of the author, the end of the world. He told her he wanted to incorporate elements of the parodic, and of satire and pastiche.

At home he had stopped listening to the news and avoided social media to shut out the daily nonsense as much as he could. He had his book to write, and this private crisis to deal with, the crisis of Sister, and that was all he could handle right now. The apocalypse of the West would just have to wait in line.

Quichotte sat alone in his room, bathed in the light of the screen. A man told him that in two years everyone would believe that the Earth was flat. A woman told him that vaccinations were part of a global conspiracy against children. A man told him that condensation trails left by high-flying jet aircraft were composed of chemical and biological agents that enabled the psychological manipulation of human beings, or sterilized women to control the population explosion, or were proof of the use of biological and/or chemical weapons upon an unsuspecting world. A woman told him that someone known as Q had unearned proof of a conspiracy against the government. A man told him about heavy traffic on the FDR.

He wasn’t interested in becoming analytical about reality.