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.

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.

Because of his blurry uncertainty about the location of the truth-lie frontier, and his personal charm and pleasant manner, he inspired confidence and came across as the perfect promoter of his cousin’s wares.

Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.

If the two guiding principles of the universe were paranoia (the belief that the world had meaning, but that meaning was located at a concealed level, which was very possibly hostile to the overt, absurd level, which meant, in brief, you) and entropy (the belief that life was meaningless, that things fell apart and the heat-death of the universe was inevitable), then he was definitely in the paranoid camp.

Here was this thing, however mediocre, to which he had given his life, his best self, his optimism; but even the richest seam in the end runs out of gold. When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.

There was no escape from dynastic biochemistry. In Miss Salma R’s family the darkness was always there, sitting like a panther in the corner of the room, waiting for its time.

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.

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.

“The insula,” replied the cricket, “unfortunately has nothing to do with conscience.” “Nor do I,” said Sancho. “I’m like the sky at night. The universe has no interest in right and wrong. It doesn’t care who lives or dies and who behaved well or badly. The universe is an explosion. It rushes outwards, pushing, growing, making room for itself. It’s a never-ending conquest. You know what the motto of the universe is? Give me more. I want it all. That’s my motto also. That’s how I see things too.”

It felt like a Christmas visit from Sanity Claus.

“Normal doesn’t feel so normal to me,” I tell him. “It’s normal to feel that way,” he replies. This is what I get instead of fatherly wisdom.

“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.’ This is also my plan. If the choice is between a necessarily tedious death and immortality, I choose to live forever.”

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.

At the end of most lives, he reminded himself, death did not arrive as a crime, but as the great mystery, which everyone had to solve alone.

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.