Blindness, Parts 1 and 2

Blindness, Part 1

More than five week have passed since the retinal surgery, and my vision is still not back. That's the bad news. The good news is that the surgeon thinks the problem is with the sutures. They take about two months to dissolve, and until they do, the light won't focus properly. I have my next appointment in mid-January, by which time I should see improvement. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Blindness, Part 2



I made the mistake of reading a book called Blindness, by Portuguese writer Jose Saramago while recovering from eye surgery, and I don't know if the translator took liberties with the translation, and does the Portuguese language have fewer grammatical rules than English?, but it took some time to adjust to the writing style. Why? Because there are run-on sentences and no paragraph breaks to speak of and punctuation was sorely lacking but once one adjusts to these things the book is quite enjoyable. Enjoyable in an excruciating kind of way and one man's joy is another man's torment, but who can tell the difference? A blindness takes over the world, starting with one man sitting at a traffic light but this is a white blindness, if such a thing can be. Can it be blindness if all one sees is white? Can so many rhetorical questions be found in any other book? No matter, as the doctor's wife would say, we all see something whether it is white or colors, and since she's the only one who can see the mess that humanity has become, yes she is the only one with vision, allegorically speaking, although others surely see things she cannot for there are many ways to see, she leads them out of the wilderness as it were to a world in which all can see which is perhaps the optimal state of mankind.