Posted Monday morning, June 15, 2020.
Sancho, the possibly imaginary teenage son of Quichotte, the Don Quixote-stand-in who’s the title-character of Salman Rushdie’s novel “Quichotte” and who may be imaginary himself---idly channel surfing the TV in their New York City hotel room chances across a news show in which the woman he fell in love with at first sight during an accidental meeting on her doorstep (he’d gone to the wrong house) is being interviewed. She turns out to be the lawyer representing the family of a South Indian immigrant who was murdered by a white American man in a Kansas bar. Sancho and Quichotte had witnessed the murder, and Sancho had gone to the house to offer his condolences and eye-witness testimony. The young lawyer mistook his purposes and didn’t appreciate his sudden rhapsodical declaration of love, under the circumstances, and she slammed the door on him, before he could even get her name. Now that he’s found her again, though, he despairs of her wanting him to contact her. Quichotte takes him out to breakfast and sets out to explain things to him. “He perceived that further discussion was required.” Like his avatar in Cervantes’ novel, Quichotte is always perceiving that further discussion is required....
Quichotte put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Television is the god that goes on giving,” he said. “This morning it has given you a big gift. You will know how to use it when the time comes.”
At the diner Sancho stared morosely at a stack of pancakes soared in maple syrup. Quichotte, eating a toasted cheese sandwich with extra bacon, perceived that further discussion was required. “In the Fifth Valley,” he began---but Sancho wasn’t in the mood for valley talk this morning, and rolled his eyes impatiently--- “we must learn that everything is connected. Look: you turned on the TV to watch a series of obscenities and then you discovered important information about this girl of yours. By chance, you may say. I say not by chance. You found it because everything is connected, this channel to that channel, this button to that button, this choice to that choice.”
He had Sancho’s attention now, and launched into a longer statement. “Once,” he said, “people believed that they lived in little boxes, boxes that contained their whole stories, and that there was no need to worry much about what other people were doing in their other little boxes, whether nearby or far away. Other people’s stories had nothing to do with ours. But then the world got smaller and all the boxes got pushed up against all the other boxes and opened up, and now that all the boxes are connected to all the other boxes, we have to understand what’s going on in all the boxes we aren’t in, otherwise we don’t know why the things in our boxes why the things happening in our boxes are happening. Everything is connected.”
---from “Quichotte” by Salman Rushdie.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.