Lately, I find myself craving the written word even more than usual. I look through the mostly unread books at my school library, in the classrooms, in boxes of trash on the sidewalk. I hoard all the interesting matter I can find, copying phrases I like into notebooks and onto post-its. It’s like the way a pregnant woman craves foods she’s never been that crazy about - cranberry sauce or pickle spears dipped in milk - and feels compelled to seek out this nourishment. Nutritionally, it all makes sense. The body understands what she cannot - that she needs some nutrient she doesn’t normally get, one that she doesn’t normally need.
This is the same way I lifted The Old Man and the Sea from a classroom library. The students at I.S. 666 can’t read complex sentences, much less Hemingway’s modernist, iceberg theoried terseness. I don’t even like Hemingway…or machismo…or fishing. So why do I need to read about pathetic Santiago and the one little boy who loves him? Well, why not?
I read at least one book each week, and this last week I read Jose Saramago’s Blindess. Wow. It was awesome in the brain rockingest way! Saramago won the Nobel Prize for the breadth of his work, but he’s most famous for Blindness. He’s also kind of infamous for his disregard for standard style in his writing. Blindess has no proper nouns, nor does it follow standard punctuation or attribute dialogue to characters. This is hard to get used to. It’s a parable about the kind of humanity realized only when the world falls apart after an epidemic of blindness. It’s very relevant in our post-Katrina world. It was relevant in the post-tsunami and post-911 world. Ever notice that the world is perpetually churning in upheaval, but surviving? The book is eternally relevant, as are compassion and empathy and responsibility. Here are my favorite quotes:
On society: “This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice.”
On the one seeing person watching the blind struggle: “For the first time since she had arrived there, the doctor’s wife felt as if she were behind a microscope and observing the behavior of a number of human beings who did not even suspect her presence, and this suddenly struck her as being contemptible and obscene. I have no right to look if the others cannot see me, she thought to herself.”
“…If, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.”
“Fear can cause blindness.”
“Why are you holding hands as you go, it simply came about, there are gestures for which we cannot always find an easy explanation, sometimes not even a difficult one can be found.”
“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.”
My favorite part: “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 say.”
“Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
