Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

Only children don’t, in their old age, have to listen to their inner voice asking accusatory questions, how can you treat your sister like this, your own sister, don’t you want to fix things, don’t you see that you should.

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.

“I see that under your old-goof act, beneath your sweet nutty disguise, you’re maybe someone else entirely, and that part of you is locked away right now. It’s like you’ve caged the beast.”

“Every quest,” Quichotte answered, “takes place both in the sphere of the actual, which is what maps reveal to us, and in the sphere of the symbolic, for which the only maps are the unseen ones in our heads. Still, the actual is also the road to the Grail. We may be after a celestial goal, but we still have to travel along the interstate.”

Human life was lived between two chasms, a Russian writer had said, the one that preceded our birth, “the cradle rocks above an abyss,” and the one we were all “heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought. I have to go back soon, she told herself, I need to reclaim it or it will be gone, I will be gone from it, and nobody will mourn my loss. She thought about Wile E. Coyote rushing out over the chasm and not falling until he looked down. That’s me, her weak voice thought, and then her strong voice answered, Then don’t look down.

Maybe, according to my insula, this is the way things are these days in America: that for some of us, the world stopped making sense. Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams. For some of us, who have started seeing the stuff the rest of us are too blind to see. Or too determined not to see it. For them, it’s shrug, business as usual, the Earth’s still flat and the climate still isn’t changing. Down there on the street, cars full of the shruggers are driving around, shrugger pedestrians are walking to work, the ghost of Woody Guthrie is walking its ribbon of highway singing this land was made for you and me. Even Woody hasn’t heard the end-of-the-world news.

I’m beginning to understand why people get religion. Just to have something solid that doesn’t change into a slippery snake without a word of warning.

These days the only way to experience joy was through chemistry. It was necessary first to unplug from the Connectivity and then, as the world faded away, to put euphoria into your mouth and suck on it. This was the lover who never disappointed you, the friend who never failed you, the partner who never cheated on you, the government that never lied. This alone was dependable, loyal, honest, and true. Sleepy, relaxed joy. Here it came. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.

“That’s the least of it. The most of it is, he was always careless with people’s hearts. He never took any responsibility for what he broke.

“When ninety-nine percent of people thought the world was flat,” Evel said, “it didn’t make the world flat. The world didn’t need people to believe it was round to be round. Right now, ninety-nine percent of people are happily having a picnic on a railway track. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t a train coming down the line, traveling pretty fast. The railway train doesn’t need people to believe it’s coming, because it’s coming.”

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.

After you were badly beaten, the essential part of you that made you a human being could come loose from the world, as if the self were a small boat and the rope mooring it to the dock slid off its cleats so that the dinghy drifted out helplessly into the middle of the pond; or as if a large vessel, a merchant ship, perhaps, began in the grip of a powerful current to drag its anchor and ran the risk of colliding with other ships or disastrously running aground. He now understood that this loosening was perhaps not only physical but also ethical, that when violence was done to a person, then violence entered the range of what that person—previously peaceable and law-abiding—afterwards included in the spectrum of what was possible. It became an option.

Time had passed, it was hard to know how much time, because time was strange now, stretching, compressing, unreliable. A week could be a month long. A lifetime could pass in a day.