Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a traveling man of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers, who, on account of his love for mindless television, had spent far too much of his life in the yellow light of tawdry motel rooms watching an excess of it, and had suffered a peculiar form of brain damage as a result.

And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen.

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

He grew up wanting to know the secret ingredient in Coca-Cola, he remembered the secret identities of all superheroes, and what was Victoria’s secret, anyway? That ladies in her era wore badly made underwear?

So, then, quit! said the wicked angel on his left shoulder. Nobody cares but you.

“What a fool I have been,” Nargis Kumari cried, in full tragic actress mode, “to allow a mere man to destroy my closest friendship. 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. I should have been beside her every minute, sunshine or rain. Now I am as empty as a bottle from which all the wine has been poured. I am a word in a dictionary whose meaning has been erased. I am as hollow as a rotten tree.”

“My character does not masturbate,” said Miss Salma R. “My character kicks ass.”

Maybe the unending Hindu-Muslim tension in the city had activated a Muslim-Hindu tension within her own mixed self and she needed to get away from that old quarrel, change that narrative, not be in that story anymore.

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.

They had the same favorite drink, they always chose the same dishes in restaurants, and when they were asked about their preferred books they answered identically, without conferring. The Magic Mountain, Madame Bovary, Don Quixote.

Beyond that, there’s only madness, a.k.a. getting religion. I have no intention of going crazy or getting religion. One nutty old coot is more than enough in this car.

There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life.

“By the height of my emotion toward you will you know me,” Quichotte cried out in high rhetorical fashion, “and by the darkness in which I dream of you, and by the handsomeness of the deeds by which I will prove myself, for handsome is as handsome does. And by the determined set of my jaw as I bend the arc of my life toward you, and by the dominant idea which possesses me, which is, that you must be mine.”

“A good knowledge of the classics,” he advised his son, “is the sign of an educated man.”

(There has always been a tent in the trunk of Quichotte’s car. Maybe we should have mentioned that. It has been there all the time. Sorry.)

If the amount of love in the universe is finite and unchanging, then it follows that as one searcher finds the love he seeks, another must lose his love; and that when one love dies here—and only when a love dies!—it becomes possible for another love to be born there.

“Already so cynical,” Quichotte said mournfully. “No great quest, my boy, was ever achieved except by those with faith.”

“But if faith is all you’ve got,” the other answered, “you’re going to lose out to the guy with the moves and the looks.”

The record warns us of the frailty of even the greatest endeavors, and the consequent need to be resolute in the pursuit of love, as strong as a lion in his prime, and as unbreakable as a holy vow; and never to give up hope.”

“What kind of question is that?” Quichotte said, coloring, and he was suddenly shouting. “It’s the question of an ignoramus. It’s the inquiry of a baboon trying to speak English. It’s the splutter of a fish out of water. It’s the twitch of an amoeba that thinks it’s a human being.

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 eviden...

He looked down. There was a cricket sitting on the car roof beside him, unafraid, not making its cricket noise, speaking English with an Italian accent.

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.

“The hawk is a great hunter,” Quichotte said. “Fish quail before its shadow. It is good to have them here. They grace our pursuit. Their presence is a blessing.”

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.

“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.”

Every show on every network tells you the same thing: based upon a true story. But that’s not true either. The true story is there’s no true story anymore. There’s no true anymore that anyone can agree on.

So maybe there is a God? Is that the third person in here? A God who’s fucking with me and with everybody else for that matter, arbitrarily changing the rules? I thought there were rules about changing the rules.

Quichotte stood up unsteadily and spread his arms. “I abandon all reason,” he cried, “and open myself to love.”

“When she said ‘go away,’ ” he tells Quichotte, “I know that she meant ‘come back.’ ”

If the choice is between a necessarily tedious death and immortality, I choose to live forever.”

“Mine was a generation when frequent sexual intercourse was thought of as freedom, and like all the men of my time, I believed in that freedom with all my lustful heart.”

Sancho began to think that Quichotte might be a virgin, just like himself. And sometimes he had a stranger thought: that just as Quichotte had invented him, so also somebody else had invented Quichotte.

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.

Time, that lethal chamber of horrors whose walls close slowly in upon the luckless inhabitant until they crush the life out of him, pressed in on Quichotte as he stood gazing up at his half sister’s apartment building.

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.

Time to stop pandering to empty-headed youth. Start pandering to the addle-brained elderly instead.

So you can be stupid and say, the law is the law, or you can be smart and say, the law is an ass.

He was not Sir Galahad, nor was he meant to be.

“The truth,” she declaimed. “It’s still out there, still breathing, buried under the rubble of the bullshit bombs. We’re the emergency rescue squad. We’re going to get it out alive. We have to, or the errorists win.”

See, if I’m bad—to quote the great Jessica Rabbit—it’s because I’m drawn that way.

Also, to pursue a woman who is a stranger to you, be aware that that may not look like love to her. That may appear to her as molestie sessuali. As we say, lo stalking.”

I’m too young to die. The fallacy of youth. Death had never cared about the ages of those it claimed.

Your good health is the thing you have until the day your doctor tells you you don’t have it anymore.

Even great Bellow, he saw in the Times, had been unclear on the question of the heart, and had asked on his deathbed: “Was I a man, or was I a jerk?”