I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what … - Salman Rushdie
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I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.
Sir Salman Rushdie (born Ahmed Salman Rushdie, Urdu: أحمد سلمان رشدی, Hindi: अह्मद सलमान रश्डी on 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British novelist and essayist. Most of his work is set on the Indian subcontinent.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Elena Ternovaja (CC BY-SA)
Also Known As
Native Name:
سلمان رُشدی
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سلمان رشدی
Alternative Names:
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
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Rushdie
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Ahmed Salman Rushdie
•
Joseph Anton
Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, chinese operas,jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society—freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.
