Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.
Interpretation
Meaning is built from our experiences and influences, often flawed, yet we defend it fiercely.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie reflects on the nature of meaning in our lives, suggesting that it is not a solid foundation but rather a fragile structure made up of various and sometimes inadequate influences, such as personal experiences, beliefs, and societal inputs. This fragility leads us to defend our sense of meaning vehemently, as it is so intertwined with our identities and perceptions of reality, even in the face of dissent or challenges.
In practice
In a discussion about identity at a philosophy meetup.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all
There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.
We talk of lost ideals, but perhaps they are not lost, only changed; when our ideal for ourselves and for our children becomes limited to prosperity and comfort, we get these, very likely, for ourselves and for them, but we get no more.
Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
Man should be master of his environment, not its slave. That is what freedom means.
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