Time & Perspective Quote by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie takes a cliché of modern unbelief - the "God-shaped hole" - and flips its emotional polarity. The first sentence is confession as performance: he once narrated himself through lack, a romantic emptiness that doubles as cultural pose. The hole is absence elevated into identity. It also smuggles in a theistic assumption: if the void is "God-shaped", then God remains the template even when God is missing. Rushdie is too sharp not to notice the irony.

The pivot lands on craft, not creed. "Now I find it is the shape" shifts attention from mourning to architecture: what matters is the outline, the negative space that tells you what kind of presence would fit. That is a novelist's instinct. Fiction lives in shaped absences - the unsaid, the implicit, the gaps the reader completes. He isn't converting so much as admitting that even rejection is a kind of relationship: the imagination keeps drawing God as a contour, a recurring form, a stubborn metaphor you can't simply delete from the human toolbox.

The context hums beneath the line. Rushdie, marked by the fatwa and by decades of public argument over blasphemy, knows that "God" is never just private spirituality; it's a social force with real consequences. Reframing the problem as "shape" is a way of surviving the binary of believer versus atheist. It grants him a third posture: not surrender, not denial, but scrutiny. The subtext is hard-won: absence can be dramatic, but form is durable - and the forms we inherit still govern what we fear, desire, and dare to say.