This is my third attempt to read Blindness and it has not been any easier than my prior attempts. I really do want to get to the end of the book. The writing technique that many fans of this book love so much left me feeling out of breath. Punctuations exist for a reason even if the state of sudden, unexplained contagion of blindness is endless.
that 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. The good and the evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality,
I like the premise of the book and the fact that the sudden onset of blindness in people and the societal response to the what is terrifying and unsolvable can be a useful way to understand human behavior. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic, those who were infected were not treated much differently that the blind internees in Saramago's book. In more recent times, in the early days of the pandemic the societal response those suffering and dying from the virus was fairly brutal. Like the dead blind man in this story, they too did not get a proper funeral.
All that being said, this is not a well-written book and it makes for truly painful reading. I don't want to make a fourth attempt seeing that I have failed for the third time now. Maybe I am not the right reader for this book and I can make peace with that
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