The Morning Before
The Chautauqua Institution sits on the shores of Lake Chautauqua in western New York, a nineteenth-century refuge where Victorian cottages cluster around a white-columned amphitheatre . For more than a century, it has hosted lectures, concerts, and earnest conversations about literature and democracy—a peculiarly American experiment in Enlightenment optimism. On the morning of 12 August 2022, the institution had invited Salman Rushdie, then seventy-five, to speak about the United States as a haven for exiled writers .