Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

‘I’m actually Indian too! Dot, not feather! So I’m happy to be here in Indian country’

all human aspiration was meaningless and all human achievement absurd when measured against the everything of everything.

In old age one becomes detached from the dominant ideas of one’s time. The present, with its arguments, its quarrelling ideas, is revealed as fleeting and unreal. The past is long gone and the future, one recognises, 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.’

From which we learn the lesson that detachment is the key to survival. Obsession destroys the possessed.

Mysteries were the perfect analogue of human life as well as human death. Human beings were mysteries to others and to themselves as well. Some chance occurrence jolted them from their sleep and they began to act in ways of which they would not have believed themselves capable. We know nothing about ourselves or our neighbours, he thought. The nice lady next door turns out to be an axe murderer, giving her mother forty whacks. The silent, smiling, bearded gentleman upstairs is revealed as a terrorist when he drives a truck into innocent people in the town centre. Death offers us clarification, it shines a harsh shadowless light on life, and then we see.

‘Remorse and forgiveness are obviously related,’ she said, ‘but it’s not a cause- and- effect relationship. The connection between them is the act. It is for the actor to decide whether or not he feels regret and remorse for the act, whether or not he is willing and ready to apologise in the hope of making amends. It is for the person acted upon to decide whether or not she feels able to set the act aside and move on, which is to say, to forgive. The decision of the person acted upon is not contingent upon the decision of the actor. One may genuinely feel remorse and make a genuine apology, and still not be forgiven, if the person acted upon is not ready to forgive.

‘All of us are in two stories at the same time,’ said the sandwich lady. ‘Life and Times. There is our own personal story, and the bigger story of what’s happening around us. When both are in trouble

simultaneously, when the crisis inside you intersects with the crisis outside you, things get a little crazy.’