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Practice dictation & shadowing on the daily life story: Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (7)
Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (7)
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(1)
Salman Rusty Life under threat.
(2)
Alas, I overestimated these men.
(3)
Within days, all but one of them had broken their promises and recommended to vilify me and my work as if we had not shaken hands.
(4)
I felt most probably I had been a great fool.
(5)
The suspension of the paperback began at once to look like surrender.
(6)
In the aftermath of the attacks on my translators.
(7)
It looks even more Craven.
(8)
It has now been more than three years since The Satanic Verses was published.
(9)
That's a long, long space for reconciliation.
(10)
Long enough, I accept that I was wrong to have given way on this point.
(11)
The Satanic Verses must be freely available and easily affordable, if only because if it is not read and studied, then these years will have no meaning.
(12)
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
(13)
Our lives teach us who we are.
(14)
I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own, and such descriptions have been raining down on me from security advisors, governments, journalists, archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs, then you might as well be dead.
(15)
Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist worldview is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.
(16)
Yet I must cling with all my might to that chameleon, that chimera, that space shifter.
(17)
My own soul must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out of step clown instincts, no matter how great the storm.
(18)
And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it.
(19)
I've lived in that messy ocean all my life.
(20)
I fished in it for my art.
(21)
This turbulence.
(22)
Sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay.
(23)
It is the sea by which I was born and which I carry within me, wherever I go.
(24)
Free speech is a nonstarter, says one of my Islamic extremist opponents.
(25)
No, Sir, it's not.
(26)
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game.
(27)
Free speech is life itself.
(28)
That's the end of my speech from this ailing balloon.
(29)
Now it's time to answer the question, What is my single life worth?
(30)
Is it worth more or less than the fat contracts and political treaties that are in here with me?
(31)
Is it worth more or less than good relations with a country which in April 1991 gave 800 women 74 lashes each for not wearing a veil?
(32)
In which the 80 year old writer Marian Perousse is still in goal and has been tortured, and whose foreign Minister says in response to criticism of his country's lamentable human rights record, international monitoring of the human rights situation in Iran should not continue indefinitely.
(33)
Iran could not tolerate such monitoring for long.
(34)
You must decide what you think a friend is worth to his friends, what you think a son is worth to his mother or a father to his son.
(35)
You must decide what a man's conscience and heart and soul are worth.
(36)
You must decide what you think a writer is worth, what value you place on a maker of stories and an arguer with the world.
(37)
Ladies and gentlemen, the balloon is sinking into the abyss.