Blindness

by Jose Saramago

This book has been on my list for awhile, but I finally gave in and bought it when I was in Portland. It's a book about blindness, as an epidemic, that strikes a whole city, a person or group at a time (maybe like the plague or the influenza). The people aren't ill in any way, their vision is just reduced to a bright white light that blots out everything else.

Of course, everything plunges into chaos. First, the government tries to create a policy of rounding up the blind and putting them somewhere (which I've added below, simply because of what I studied at Tech). The book is written like this, very few new paragraphs, and little in the way of punctuation for sentences. It kind of lends a dream-like, rushed quality to the story. And there are no names - they people feel them irrelevant, without their sight, or maybe it's just that the author did. These are hard to get used to, as a practical matter for reading, but then again, so was the sudden blindness for the characters.

Anyway, at the institution, things go from bad, to worse, to sub-human, or maybe it's human and I just don't like to think that we're capable of treating each other in this way. Some of the words, the descriptions turned my stomach and broke my heart. And though they're moving, they're not the parts of the book that I want to remember the details of, so I'm not going to include them here. At any rate, the book is amazing, and people talk about it being an allegory, but I don't know for what. Or at any rate, if it's a specific reference to something, than I've missed it. But if it's more of how to get at the meat, the whole of humanity (shining, grubby or terrible moments), then it's succeeded.

"According to the ancient practice, inherited from the time of cholera and yellow fever, when ships that were contaminated or suspected of carrying infection had to remain out at sea for forty days, and in words within the grasp of the general public, it was a matter of putting all these people into quarantine, until further notice. These very words, Until further notice, apparently deliberate, but in fact, enigmatic since he could not think of any others, were pronounced by the Minister, who later clarified his thinking, I meant that this could easily mean forty days as forty weeks, or forty months, or forty years, the important thing is that they should stay in quarantine. Now we have to decide where to put them, Minister, said the President of the Commission of Logistics and Security set up rapidly for the purpose and responsible for the transportation, isolation, and supervision of the patients, What immediate facilities are available, the Minister wanted to know, We have a mental hospital standing empty until we decide what to do with it, several military installations which are no longer being used because of the recent restructuring of the army, a building designed for a trade fair that is nearing completion, and there is even, although no one has been able to explain why, a supermarket about to go into liquidation, In your opinion, which of these buildings would best suit our purpose, The barracks offer the greatest security, Naturally, There is, however, one drawback, the size of the place is likely to make it both difficult and costly to keep an eye on those interned, Yes, I can see that, As for the supermarket, we would probably run up against various legal obstacles, legal matters that would have to be taken into account, Ant what about the building for the trade fair, That's the one site I think we should ignore, Minister, Why, Industry wouldn't like it, millions have been invested in the project, So that leaves the mental hospital, Yes, Minister, the mental hospital, Well then, let's opt for the mental hospital."

"Is she beautiful, she was more beautiful once, that's what happens to all of us, we were more beautiful once, You were never more beautiful said the wife of the first blind man. Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armour, we might say. The doctor's wife has nerves of steel, and yet the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they are crying they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain. These are moments that cannot last for ever, these women have been here for more than an hour, it is time they felt cold, I'm cold, said the girl with the dark glasses."