the pencil reads

On the recommendation of Eric and Jim, I got the book from the library and buckled down to read it in one obsessive swallow. This is a frightening book, in more ways than one.

Personally, it is frightening because I can imagine all of it coming true. My buddy lost her hearing suddenly and inexplicably in October 2004. She simply turned to me and said, "I can't hear out of my left ear." I only raised my eyebrow and said, "Oh?" The vertigo and the puking and the sickness and the ambulance will come later, but when silence first falls, it falls quietly.

So why should an epidemic of blindess be so unbelievable? Human beings have been at the mercy of plagues, rats, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides and eruptions to great and terrible devastation. Why shouldn't we become like animals, each for each's own? If the bird flu mutates into a human flu, God forbid, it will spread faster than SARS ever did, but not as fast as terror can infect.

I didn't need any convincing of the believability of the story. Yet Saramago was conscious of his narrative voice, at times trying to justify to the reader the omniscience of the narrator:

From this point onward, apart from a few inevitable comments, the story of the old man with the black eyepatch will no longer be followed to the letter, being replaced by a reorgainsed version of his discourse, re-evaulated in the light of a correct and more appropriate vocabulary. The reason for this previously unforeseen change is the rather formal controlled language, used by the narrator, which almost disqualifies him as a complementary reporter, however important he may be, because without him we would have no way of knowing what happened in the outside world, as a complementary reporter, as we were saying, of these extraordinary events, when as we know the description of any facts can only gain with the rigour and suitability of the terms used. (120)

I found it strange that Saramago was so conscious of being an omniscient narrator when his prose was, how to put it, so fluid. You don't even know where one sentence ends and where one starts, where one person stop talking and another starts, let alone worry about an omniscient narrator. Perhaps his writing style is a metaphor for the common type blindness in society today -- where you see everything, but you never notice anything real; just as the doctor lamented that he spent his career looking into eyes, but never what was behind them. Perhaps the blindness of an entire city was simply to show them what was in their hearts.

Which brings me to the next point. Blindness is also frightening in what it is trying to say about human society. In a way, blindness should not be so terribly delibitating. As Saramago puts it, in the words of the doctor, why should anyone die of blindness alone? One dies of blindness and AIDS, blindness and cancer, blindness and accidents, but should never die of blindness alone! Yet, without sight, with the external world still remaining the same, society falls apart. When you take away our names, our learned habits, our methods of navigating this life, what is underneath? If the chickens scratch away at the dirt in the yard of the "old witch", would they find a decomposing body? When words are lost, all we have is the indent left by the ballpoint pen on paper.

Blindness is a penetrating and blinding gaze into the soul of man, and the celebration of what treasures that can be found within. Definitely worth the read.

Posted on Wednesday, April 26, 2006 at 3:25 PM. :)