5/23/2023 0 Comments Seeing saramago![]() ![]() ![]() “Very evidently Saramago’s novels are not simple parables. Seeing is all about them: the perverters of reason, the universal liars. But the truly powerful of our world don’t even appear in Blindness. The group of men who seize power in an asylum and use and abuse the weaker inmates have indeed abandoned self-respect and human decency: they are a microcosm of the corruption of power. Some behave with stupid, selfish brutality, sauve qui peut. ![]() ![]() This, on the face of it, is an odd description of Blindness, for in that book it is powerless people who insult human dignity-ordinary people, terrified at finding themselves and everyone else blind, everything out of control. “Accepting his Nobel prize, Saramago, calling himself ‘the apprentice,’ said: ‘The apprentice thought, “we are blind,” and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.’ ![]()
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