Blindness

Blindness

Jose Saramago

A minute later, because of one of those all too common abdications of the body, that chooses to give up in certain moments of anguish or despair, when, if it were guided by logic alone, all its nerves should be alert and tense, a kind of weariness crept over him, more drowsiness than real fatigue, but just as heavy.

 He dreamt at once that he was pretending to be blind, he dreamt that he was for ever closing and opening his eyes, and, that on each occasion, as if he were returning from a journey, he found waiting for him, firm and unaltered, all the forms and colours of the world as he knew it.

Fighting has always been, more or less, a form of Blindness

And when is it necessary to kill, she asked herself as she headed in the direction of the hallway, and she herself answered the question, when what is still alive is already dead.

But it is a question of being patient, of letting time take its course, we should have learnt this once and for all, that destiny has to make many turnings before arriving anywhere.

Death stalks the streets, but in the back gardens life goes on.

The old woman in the first floor slowly open the window, she doesn't want anyone to know that she has this sentimental weakness, but no noise can be heard coming from the street, they have already gone, they have left this place but almost no one ever passes, the old woman ought to be pleased, in this way she will not have to share her hens and rabbits with the others, she should be pleased but is not, in her blind eye appear two tears, for the first time she asked herself if she had some good reason for wanting to go on living. she could find no reply, replies do not always come when needed, and it often happens that the only possible reply is to wait for them.

What the eyes do not see the heart doesn't grieve over

You're not ugly, No, as a matter of fact I'm not, but at my age, How old are you, asked the girl with the dark glasses, getting on for fifty, Like my mother and her, Her, what, is she still beautiful, she was more beautiful once, that's what happens to all of us, we were all 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 sayasay, The doctor's wife has nerves of steelisteel, and yet the doctor's wife isris 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 too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain.

Was it hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state the fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible, Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them,