SALMAN RUSHDIE AND THE FORCE OF WORDS

The storytelling animal that is man. The impact of Salman Rushdie's words.

"To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no "real" genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were his father's, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life by them in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away." 

(Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton)

I have just started reading Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton but he's a master of the word. He is a master of words and always finds a way to express in a very intelligent way what can be said with the heart and the brains. The political reality is juxtaposed with childhood memories and re-invented stories, he leaves contrasting characteristics in a man what they are: opposites that should not be compulsively reconciled, opposites that makes you what you are. You can be a rebel and you can be a not-rebel. That's the power of man, "the storytelling animal". 

He transforms words into sentences I'd like to underline, to chew and to swallow so that I'll never forget them.