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A couple of Fridays ago, Bestor Cram was up early, as usual, at the house his family rented at the Chautauqua Institution. He started off with a 3-mile run around the grounds, before returning to help his 10-year-old grandson Julian prepare for camp.

Once the child jumped on his bike and took off, Cram, 76, a documentary filmmaker and founder of the Boston-based Northern Light Productions, quickly finished his own work. He and his wife, Penny, planned to take the three-block walk to see Salman Rushdie a renowned author "who would not shut his mouth and would not drop his pen, as Cram put it, despite threats against his life speak in the amphitheater as part of a lecture series.

A pedestrian bikes through the Chautauqua Institution Friday, Aug. 19, 2022.

Cram has been at Chautauqua for parts of 65 summers. His mother was born on the grounds and his grandfather, Arthur Bestor,was an influential president there in the early 20th century. While Cram and his wife have no formal link to institution leadership, there is still a Bestor Society at Chautauqua, and Bestor Plaza is a green, beloved landmark.

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"It is a place," Cram said, "where we feel like we're coming home."

A judge has refused to grant bail to the man accused of trying to kill Salman Rushdie as the acclaimed author prepared to give a talk in western New York. Hadi Matar appeared in a western New York courtroom after a grand jury indicted him on charges that he rushed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and stabbed Rushdie multiple times. During the court hearing, public defender Nathaniel Barone asked the judge to do something to stop reporters from trying to contact Matar at the jail. The lawyer said the jail had received several hundred phone calls.

He sees that bond, that philosophy, as intertwined with his own life: He served as a Marine in Vietnam and was a leader afterward in a veterans movement against the war, and he has offered revelations about struggle, courage and justice in a lifetimes worth of films he directed, produced or helped create.

You come here to have your brain disturbed, he said of Chautauqua, a setting where he seeks to be challenged and unsettled by great questions of the day, but always under an assumption:

Its about as safe a place as you can go.

On that Friday, he walked alone to the amphitheater. Penny would arrive a little later with some friends, so Cram settled into the fourth or fifth row. He was close by as Rushdie and Henry Reese, founder of Pittsburgh's City of Asylum, took their seats for what was supposed to be a conversation about freedom and safety for persecuted artists.

Filmmaker Bestor Cram listens to the morning lecture from Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa at the Chautauqua Institution Friday, Aug. 19, 2022. A week earlier, Cram was near the stage when Salman Rushdie was assaulted.

In the middle of all this, Cram said, he heard a scream or a yelp in the amphitheater, more than one voice recognizing that someone was jumping on the stage.

There was no time to process it: We just watched a figure literally dash as from the blue from the edge of the stage into the center and pounce on top of Salman Rushdie and begin raising a fist, up and down, up and down.

To be in that moment, Cram said, is impossible to fully describe. The audience went in an instant from the notion of the safe, the communal, the familiar, into raw witness of the unthinkable. He sees that element as a glimpse, a merciless bridge, toward so many historic acts of targeted bloodshed, killing and malice that degraded the sanctity of ordinary life including the horrific madness of the racist slaughter in Buffalo, three months ago at Tops.

It took a second to realize an attempted assassination was taking place, Cram said, and then several onlookers from the closest rows rushed forward to interrupt the stabbing, which Cram believes allowed Rushdie his chance to survive.

Cram quickly joined others hurrying toward the stage to help. Once there, he saw the attacker police later identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, 24, of New Jersey had been subdued and Rushdie and Reese were receiving aid. The documentarian in Cram kicked in: He pulled out his phone to record what he could, and a young man Cram believes was security pushed him and knocked the phone from his hand.

Visitors enjoy an afternoon in Bestor Plaza at the Chautauqua Institution.

While startled, he understood: Everyone was fraught. He picked up the phone and made his way through the stunned crowd to find Penny. Their immediate concern was Julian, especially since the boy was late getting home from camp for lunch, but they soon received a call from camp officials saying the children were safe.

Sitting with his grandparents an hour or two later, Julian explained how the kids had all been asked to shelter in place. The10-year-old already exactly knew what those words meant, and why he needed to listen:

He had been trained to realize, Cram said, that someone nearby was causing life-threatening harm.

As the day wore on, Cram had a visceral reaction: His body shook uncontrollably in response to what he saw. He and Penny joined some friends who had also been there to try and talk through all of it, their feelings echoing a response shared with me last week by Bethanne Snodgrass, who coordinates an annual literary arts contest at Chautauqua:

The word that keeps coming to Snodgrass is violation, above all else to the life and safety of Rushdie the writer whose survival and well-being is constantly on her mind and on a secondary level to everything Chautauqua is supposed to represent.

Rushdie, who has been living under death threats from Iran for more three decades after the publication of his book "Satanic Verses," is hospitalizedon a ventilator with critical injuries, said Andrew Wylie, his literary agent.

Cram felt the same thing in watching the chaos and violence on a stage whose long-accepted purpose is providing safe haven to national or global giants, women and men whose lives and acts are symbolic of hope.

Chautauqua, then, is an extension of that whole idea for Cram, framed not by easy definition but through encounters and discussions renewed for him since childhood. Right now, in a country torn into fierce, defensive cliques, he said the question there "on the tip of everyones tongue is the fear of all the division that is working to degrade the nation.

The gift and model of Chautauqua, he said, was always the notion that it is a safe place for those who reasonably and philosophically disagree. You never feel threatened because of a difference of opinion, Cram said, which makes the Rushdie attack as Snodgrass said - a kind of ultimate violation.

To come back from it, Cram said, will be a process of accepting that Chautauqua as a living institution will have this blood stain on its historical markers, and in some respects the trauma of that becomes part of its living history.

He sees the real question about change as not involving some landscape of brick and mortar, of rustling trees and quiet lanes, but in what happens within people who define the place. The whole point of Chautauqua, he said, is to take what you absorb and apply it to the world, which in reflection he knows he tried to do with his own life.

Documentary filmmaker Bestor Cram: As a child at Chautauqua, he grew up seeing his family name on this sculpture.

For now, his thoughts keep returning to Rushdie and his recovery. This weekend, before Cram, Penny and their grandson prepared to leave for their Boston home, Cram took another Friday walk to the amphitheater, where Maria Ressa was a speaker in the lecture series.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa gives the morning lecture at the Chautauqua Institution Friday, August 19, 2022. (Mark Mulville/Buffalo News)

Ressa, an investigative journalist, received a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for risking her life to do her job in the Philippines, where she was arrested and faced government threats of retaliation. At the amphitheater, she acknowledged the bloodshed of a week earlier on the same stage, honoring Rushdie and the sacrifices he made so he could speak, and Cram listened intently as she made passionate use of the same freedom.

She described the dangers around the globe of the digital mob, whose cruelties and excess can suffocate discussion, threaten democracy and enflame violence, as in the radicalization of the accused killer in Buffalo. In an era that can seem despairing and overwhelming, she said unyielding empathy is an engine and strategy of hope, and she offered five elements that she prescribes as building blocks of courage.

Each of us, she said, needs to be ready to learn and to speak out, to trust and to have faith, and to draw a line a place of value, of bedrock belief in right and wrong that we will not cross, despite the threat or risks.

It was both inspiring and unsettling, exactly why Cram was grateful for the parting message. This was the creed he learned in childhood, unbroken at Chautauqua.

Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Buffalo News. Email him at skirst@buffnews.com.

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Sean Kirst: After Rushdie stabbing, close witness seeks hope in deep roots of Chautauqua - Buffalo News