Novels, Deep-Read · José Saramago · No.49
Ensaio sobre a Cegueira · Portugal · 1995 · José Saramago
The light turns green and the first car does not move. Horns start up behind it. Somebody gets out to bang on the window and finds a man sitting at the wheel with both hands in the air and his eyes wide open, shouting a sentence nobody in that intersection is ready to hear: I am blind.
He has not fallen into darkness. He has fallen into white—a milky, luminous, edgeless white. He repeats the sentence several times, as if trying to hear it himself. Strangers push his car to the kerb and stand him on the pavement.
A helpful man says, let me take you home.
He does take him home. Then he turns around and drives the car away.
In an unnamed city, people begin going blind one after another—a "white sickness"—and the government locks the first patients and their contacts into a disused mental asylum with soldiers and a machine gun at the gate; inside there is no water, no management and nobody in charge, and within a fortnight a few hundred people who cannot see one another reinvent looting, monopoly, pricing and mass rape. Among them is one woman who never goes blind at all: she lied her way in to stay with her husband, and so becomes the only person alive who can see exactly what is happening—and the only one able to act on it.
José Saramago (1922–2010) was Portuguese, born to landless peasants, and worked as a mechanic, an editor and a translator before he began writing novels seriously in his fifties; he became famous around sixty with Baltasar and Blimunda. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, the first writer in Portuguese to do so—the Swedish Academy praised parables "sustained by imagination, compassion and irony" that let us apprehend an elusive reality once again. He was a lifelong member of the Portuguese Communist Party, and after the uproar over The Gospel According to Jesus Christ in 1991 he moved to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, where he died.
Blindness was published in 1995. The Portuguese title translates literally as "Essay on Blindness"—he called the book an ensaio, an essay, a word that also carries the sense of a trial run or a rehearsal, which is fair warning: this is not a story that might happen, it is an experiment that has been set up. The English translation is by Giovanni Pontiero, published in 1997; the translator had died the year before.
Its place among dystopias is unusual. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are about design—somebody has painstakingly built a machine to govern you. Saramago writes the opposite case: nobody is governing at all. There is no Big Brother, no Leader, no ideology; the state effectively leaves the book around page thirty, and every rule that follows is grown in a fortnight by a few hundred hungry ordinary people. The question here is not how bad tyranny can get. It is a more embarrassing one: take the management away, and what is left.
The first man to go blind is waiting at a red light. No warning, no pain, no darkening—what he sees is a bright, even, milky white. Seed ①Saramago fixes the rule in the first paragraph, and it is the opposite of the obvious one: this is not blindness as we picture it. The blindness we imagine is the lights going out, a box closing over you. This one is the lights all on, so bright that nothing can be told from anything, as if a bucket of milk had been poured over the eye. The book's central metaphor is loaded in that sentence.
A passer-by walks him home. The good Samaritan who volunteered then turns around and steals his car. Seed ②Saramago narrates this with total composure—no indignation, and a couple of sentences that patiently explain what the thief was thinking: the opportunity was simply there, a blind man and a car. The first evil act in the book happens while the catastrophe still has exactly one victim.
The blind man's wife takes him to an eye clinic. In the waiting room sit a girl with dark glasses (conjunctivitis; she wears them at night; she earns money sleeping with men), a boy with a squint and his mother, an old man with a black eyepatch. The doctor examines him at length and finds nothing organically wrong—the eye is fine, the optic nerve is fine, whatever is white is not in there. That night the doctor reads everything he can find, telephones the Ministry of Health to report an infectious disease he cannot identify, hangs up, looks up, and the room is white.
Then everyone from the waiting room, without exception. The car thief goes blind too, while driving the stolen car.
The authorities respond quickly and entirely by the book: ambulances, and the blind plus everyone who has been near them are taken away to be quarantined. The doctor's wife stands in the doorway looking at the men who have come to collect her husband, and says the second decisive lie of this novel: I have gone blind too, I am going with him. Seed ③Nobody verifies it. In a country that has just discovered blindness is contagious, who is going to test the eyes of a woman volunteering to be locked up.
They are shut into an abandoned mental hospital. Empty wards, iron beds, corridors, an inner courtyard, one gate, and soldiers outside it.
A loudspeaker over the entrance plays the regulations at intervals, a recorded male voice, unemotional, one clause at a time: food will be left inside the gate and you will collect it yourselves; anyone crossing the line will be shot without warning; the dead are to be buried in the yard with no ceremony; disputes are to be settled among yourselves; nobody is coming in. That broadcast is the coldest passage in the book, because every clause of it is reasonable. It is not cruel. It simply says "we are not coming in" in fifteen different ways.
At first they try to organise: count the beds, queue, share out the food, agree who sleeps where and who cleans the lavatories. The doctor's authority has not quite expired and he arranges some of it. This order lasts under a week. The first thing to collapse is not morality, it is sanitation. Nobody can see where the lavatories are, nobody can fix a pipe, and soon people are relieving themselves in the corridors, in corners, under their own beds; it comes back on the soles of shoes; the smell becomes the most persistent character in the novel. Saramago is merciless about this because it is exactly his point: the first line of dignity is not conviction, it is being able to wash your hands.
More people keep arriving. The wards fill; people sleep in the corridors. The army outside grows more frightened—contact means infection, and they are standing at the door. A man gropes his way to the gate to ask for medicine; the soldiers shout once and then fire.
The car thief is nearly finished by now. In the dark he reaches for the girl with dark glasses and gets her stiletto heel driven into his thigh. No water, no antiseptic, no bandage; within days the wound is rotting. He can't bear it, crawls out of the ward and along the ground towards the gate, calling out that he needs a doctor. A sentry sees something moving on the ground in the searchlight and shoots. Payoff ② ↑This bullet is worth stopping on. His first appearance in the book made him its first wrongdoer—he walked a newly blinded stranger home and drove off in his car; and he dies because he crawled out to beg for help. Saramago does not give him a comeuppance; he lets a procedure kill him. The soldier who fires does not know who he is and does not need to. He has been lying all this time in the same ward as the man he robbed, who recognises his voice and can do nothing whatever about it. Evil repaid and evil unrepaid turn out, in that one shot, to be the same event.
The old man with the eyepatch arrives later, bringing two things: news of the outside, and a pocket radio. Seed ④At night they crowd around his bed to listen. The broadcasts say the sickness is still spreading, that the authorities urge calm, that measures are being taken. Then one day the batteries die—or rather, there is nothing on the air.
Now the heart of the book.
A new intake arrives, and one of them has come in with a pistol. A blind man with a gun, in a building where everyone is blind, is the entire military situation. They take ward three, and the first thing they do is get to the food before anybody else and carry it away. From that morning food is no longer distributed. It is sold.
Their terms: if you want to eat, hand over your valuables. Watches, rings, pens, lighters, cash, necklaces. The other wards comply—going out to fight for it is suicide, and so is starving. One of the men in ward three used to be an accountant; blind, he can still write braille, so he enters every item in a notebook: which ward handed over what, what it is worth, how many days of food it buys. Seed ⑤This is the least hellish and most hellish detail in the novel: they are not simply robbing anyone. They are keeping accounts.
The valuables run out fast. Ward three announces the new tariff: if you want to eat, send us your women. Each ward in turn delivers its women, and each delivery buys a certain number of days of food.
The first ward holds a meeting in the dark. Most of the men say nothing, and saying nothing is a vote. The doctor can neither find an argument against it nor bring himself to argue for it. What settles it is the women themselves: refuse, and the whole ward starves, women included; agree, and there is food. Saramago allows nobody a dignified exit here. This is not a tragedy that befalls them; it is a transaction that has been costed, and everyone in the room knows what is being exchanged for what.
Then the corridor. The women go in single file, each with a hand on the shoulder in front, led by the only person who can see. Some of them cannot walk properly on the way back. The second delivery is made by the women of ward two, and one of them dies in that room during the night; her body is carried back and buried in the yard.
The doctor's wife has by now seen far too much of this place. She watches her husband have sex with the girl with dark glasses a few feet from her—she does not make a scene, she even covers for him, and afterwards she bears the girl no grudge; the two of them become the strongest alliance in the book. Saramago refuses her the position of saint: he makes her swallow that humiliation first, and only then lets her act.
She acts on the night of the second delivery. She has a pair of scissors with her, and in ward three she waits until the man with the gun tips his head back and leaves his throat completely open, and puts the scissors into it. Nobody sees her do it. A room full of blind men, and only she knows what has just happened.
That stroke is the maturity date of her lie. Payoff ③ ↑She said "I am blind too" in order not to be separated from her husband; a fortnight later the same lie has made her the only person in the building entitled to kill—and the only one who cannot delegate it, because sight is what the job requires. She asked for the right to keep him company and was issued the right to execute a man. No one can judge her for it either, since no one can see.
The leader dies. Ward three is in chaos for one night, and then settles: the accountant takes the gun and takes the notebook, the ledger goes on, the tariff stands. Payoff ⑤ ↑This is the book's most unsentimental judgement on power: killing the boss did not cost the regime a single meal. What a pair of scissors can reach is a man. It cannot reach the ledger.
What ends it is not justice but fire. A woman from ward two has a cigarette lighter; she gropes her way to the mattresses barricading ward three's door and sets them alight. Old wood, old kapok, rubbish everywhere—the fire crosses the whole building in minutes. Blind people trample one another in burning corridors, shouting, looking for a door. The woman who started it dies inside.
The doctor's wife drags her small group to the gate, braced for the bullets.
There is nobody there. No sentry, no searchlight, no warning shout. The gate is open, and beyond it is a street full of people feeling their way along. Payoff ④ ↑The day the radio went quiet they assumed the batteries had failed; in fact that was the day the outside world ended—the last announcer had gone blind too, and the "measures are being taken" they had been listening to had lost its subject some time before. The soldiers went blind in batches, and then nobody came to guard the gate at all. For days they had been imprisoned by a door with nothing behind it. What actually held them there was their belief that order was still out there.
The city is the book's second summit. Rubbish knee-deep, shops emptied, cars abandoned mid-street, dogs in packs eating the dead. Everyone alive is looking for food: they walk in files with a hand on the wall, they turn corners by smell, they relieve themselves where they stand because there is no alternative, they fight, because fighting needs no eyes.
The doctor's wife becomes the eyes of seven people: her husband, the first blind man and his wife, the girl with dark glasses, the boy with the squint, the old man with the eyepatch. A dog comes up in the street and licks the tears off her face, and follows them from then on—the book calls it the dog of tears.
She goes down into the storeroom under a supermarket, fills plastic bags in the dark and counts the steps back up. When she reaches the street, the hungry smell what she is carrying and every face on it turns towards her. She has one thing nobody else has, sight; and therefore one more thing nobody else has, the knowledge that she could be hunted at any moment.
They go to the first blind man's flat and find strangers living in it, a blind couple; the man says he is a writer. He is still writing—line crushed onto line, the strokes overlapping, and he cannot see it and will not stop. She reads a few lines and cannot read the rest. That page is Saramago putting his hand into his own book to say something about his trade: do you go on writing when there is nobody who can read.
And the church. They go in out of the rain, and the doctor's wife looks up and sees that every image in it—every painted and carved saint, and Christ as well—has had its eyes covered with white cloth or painted over in white. She cries out; the blind people in the church hear that the statues have gone blind and stampede for the door. Who did it and why is never answered. Only one possibility is left standing: that it was done by the last person there who still believed, and that he wanted his God to see no more than the rest of them.
Finally they move into the doctor's own flat, where there is still water in the roof tank. Three women strip and wash on the balcony in the rain, using the last of the shampoo, soaping each other's backs, laughing out loud. This is the only passage in the book that could be called happiness, and it arrives after two hundred pages of filth, placed to the paragraph.
It ends as unaccountably as it began. One day the first blind man suddenly shouts that he can see. Then the second, then the third, one after another, the white going out of the city like a tide. No explanation, no cure, no scientist announcing a breakthrough. Saramago will not give you that comfort.
The people in the flat set about identifying one another; most of them have never seen each other's faces and know only voices. The doctor and his wife have an exchange whose sense is: why we went blind I don't know, and perhaps we never did go blind—perhaps we have always been blind, blind people who can see and do not look.
Then she goes to the window. There are people running in the street, shouting, holding each other in the rain. She raises her head to look at the sky. Payoff ① ↑The bright white that was poured into the first man's eyes on page one is now spread across the whole sky—my turn, she thinks. She lowers her eyes in fear. The city is still there.
The last page tips the same bucket of milk that was tipped on the first, this time over the one person who never went blind. It is a beautiful closing move: she is the only one who has been looking the whole time, and therefore the only one entitled to be afraid at the end. She is afraid, she looks down, the city is still there—and the book stops, granting her neither blindness nor peace of mind.
Put the five acts together and the fuse is not the disease. The disease is natural, indiscriminate, owed to nobody; what lights the two hundred pages that follow is the order to lock them up—people who cannot see one another put into a building with no water, no management and nobody responsible, a machine gun at the gate, and a recorded voice telling them to settle their own disputes. Everything after that is the burn: the sanitation, the monopoly, the ledger, the tariff, the corridor, the scissors, the fire. And that order was issued in accordance with sound public-health instinct and correct administrative procedure, by entirely normal people. The catastrophe supplied only the conditions. It was the order that decided what these people would become.
The craft in the opening pages is all in where the camera stands. Saramago does not go inside the man's head to write fear; he puts the lens above the road: green light, front car doesn't move, horns, somebody swearing, somebody getting out. A species-level catastrophe is first detected by the vehicles behind it honking.
Then the choice of white. Choosing white over black buys three things at once. Readers have a ready-made image for darkness and none at all for "so bright that nothing can be made out," so they have to relearn perception alongside the characters. In darkness you can still hide; in white light there is not even a direction to hide in. And it pulls the disease away from the tired metaphor of ignorance-as-darkness: these people have not fallen into the dark, they have been drowned in light.
The delivery of the women to ward three is one of the most skilful treatments of sexual violence in modern fiction, and the method is switching off every adjective. Saramago writes no bodies, no pleasure, nothing with a charge in it. He writes numbers and movements: how many, how many steps, who is holding whose shoulder, where the door is, who is missing on the way back, who cannot walk. The point of view stays on the only woman who can see, and what she has been required to do is look.
That arrangement is cruel and exact: she takes the burden of witnessing on the reader's behalf. What keeps the reader from becoming a voyeur is that the eyes in the narration are being held open under duress, not out of appetite. And the passage afterwards—washing themselves with a little water—is far longer than the assault itself. Saramago puts his ink into the aftermath rather than the act, and that is a position taken without a word of comment.
The three women washing in the rain is the book's most famous passage, half because of where it sits and half because of the contrast. Where: it comes after the two filthiest hundred pages in modern fiction, when the reader's nose has been abused for an entire novel—and then there is rainwater, lather, laughter. Contrast: they are naked, dirty, thin, injured, and the moment is beautiful without any admixture at all, because nobody is looking. The only one looking is the doctor's wife, watching two women who cannot see themselves, and finding them beautiful enough to hurt.
Half of the book's argument is hidden in these two pages. The preceding two hundred prove how far people rot when no gaze constrains them. This passage proves the other possibility available under exactly the same conditions: when nobody is watching, a person may also stop performing altogether. Shame and freedom are two faces of one thing, and Saramago writes both—one in two hundred pages, one in two.
The rules are laid down cleanly: instantaneous onset, no warning, no pain; white rather than black; no detectable lesion in the eye; violently contagious, with almost no one who is exposed escaping it; no treatment; and in the end it withdraws by itself, just as unaccountably. Honestly: this is not medicine, it is a premise. No such disease exists—one that blinds a city in days and then releases it wholesale—and Saramago never pretends to be writing epidemiology. He does not even give the city or the country a name.
But there is one rule he keeps rigorously, and the whole book stands on it: the disease itself does no evil. It does not select the poor or the wicked, it punishes no one; the doctor goes blind, the thief goes blind, the soldiers go blind. So not one of the cruelties in this book can be charged to the pathogen. Every one of them was arranged afterwards by people. The catastrophe is made perfectly neutral so that nobody can put the bill on it later.
There is not a single proper name in the novel. People are the doctor's wife, the girl with dark glasses, the first blind man, the old man with the black eyepatch, the boy with the squint, the car thief. The city has no name, the country has no name, the decade has no name. That buys three things:
The cost is real too: it is very hard to love someone who has no name. The book stuns people and distresses them, but few readers come away saying they loved a character in it. These are positions, not lives. That is the standing discount on parable.
Saramago's sentences are outrageously long, a paragraph often runs for pages, and dialogue is stitched straight into the narration with no line breaks, no quotation marks and no dashes—only a comma and a capital letter to signal that somebody else is now speaking. A great many readers give up right there.
In this novel, though, the manner is not a stylistic tic, it is the apparatus itself: it forces you to read by ear. You cannot tell who is talking; you work it out from tone and context, which is precisely what the people in that building do all day. The reader's eyes are deprived of typography as a walking stick, and reader and character are put in the same position. The long sentences also abolish pauses, so the filth and the cruelty come at you without the breathing space between paragraphs. Form here is not packaging, it is the other half of the same experiment.
The narrator is not invisible either. Saramago's voice interrupts with a sarcasm, an aside, a proverb-shaped verdict, like an old man telling you a story and shaking his head at it. That voice is the only thing in the book that can still see—in a sense the narrator and the doctor's wife hold the same post: both have been sentenced to witness.
The doctor's wife conceals it for almost the whole book. Take the case for telling to its strongest. In that situation sight is a pure public good: say it, and the first ward can organise immediately—share the food, find the lavatories, avoid ward three's ambushes, perhaps deal with the gun before the violence escalates. For a stretch of the book, her silence amounts to letting people starve, fall and be robbed in front of her. "With ability comes responsibility" is not a slogan here, it is executable: she has one extra pair of eyes and every day she withholds them costs somebody something.
Now take the case for silence, and take it further than her defenders usually do. The moment she goes public she stops being a person and becomes a resource. A few hundred starving, terrified, sightless people will realise at once that the only scarce asset in the building is attached to one woman. Whoever controls her controls everything, and the pistol in ward three will come for her first. She will be required to see for everyone around the clock, not permitted to sleep, fought over, allocated, imprisoned inside her usefulness. And a subtler layer: the instant she admits she can see, everything she has already witnessed becomes evidence against her—you watched us live like this for a fortnight and said nothing. Silence is the only way she keeps herself from being requisitioned.
Scaled down, this dilemma is everywhere. The only person on the team who can actually read the spreadsheet; the only one in the family who understands hospitals; the only one among your friends with money; the only one who can write the report. Disclose your capability and you will be conscripted; withhold it and you carry alone the knowledge of what you are watching people suffer. Saramago does not choose for her. He simply works her almost to collapse, and then, after she has killed a man, lets her tell herself: I can see, so it had to be me.
The case in favour is hard to dent. The facts on the ground: a group with one gun has monopolised all the food and has turned rape into a published tariff; there are no police, no courts, no higher authority; the body you might appeal to is a loudspeaker playing a recording. Demanding "process" in that room is demanding that the victims queue. And she is the only one who can do it—not the best qualified, the only one able. When a community has lost all its enforcement capacity, capacity itself becomes the obligation. If she does nothing, the next file of women walks that corridor tomorrow.
The case against is just as hard, and less comfortable. First, her power comes from exactly the same place as the power she is destroying: he has the gun, she has the eyes; each holds something nobody else has, and neither is accountable to anyone. She kills him for abusing a unique capability, using her own unique capability to pass sentence. Second, look at the consequences: after the killing ward three is disordered for a night, then the accountant takes the gun and the ledger and the tariff is unchanged; what actually ends the regime is a fire, and the fire kills people who had nothing to do with any of it. Her stroke is morally satisfying and structurally close to useless. Third, and least pleasant: she picks the moment when the man is at his most contemptible and least defended. People are never more certain that they embody justice than when their opponent is at his most disgusting—which is exactly when judgement is least reliable.
There is no right answer, but there is a test you can carry out of the room: the problem with private justice is never whether this particular instance was right; it is that it permanently assigns the question of right to whoever, at that moment, is most able to act. You can accept this one because you happen to agree with her judgement. You will not always agree with the next person holding the scissors.
First, the case that eating is correct. Refusing saves nobody: the women have already gone, the price has already been paid, and tipping the food away now only wastes what it cost and starves a few more of the old and the young. There is also something ugly inside the refusal—buying your own innocence with somebody else's sacrifice. You are not eating this meal for their sake, or for the sake of sleeping tonight? Eating it in silence, and admitting that this is now your situation, may be more honest than a fine speech.
Now the case that eating makes you complicit, at full strength. A price only exists if someone accepts it. Ward three can announce "women for food," but the transaction is completed only when the other side actually delivers the women and actually eats what comes back. The men with the gun supply the violence; the people at the table supply the demand. And note Saramago's detail: at the meeting, most of the men said nothing. Saying nothing is the cheapest possible form of participation—it lets the trade happen and lets every man tell himself he was not the one who proposed it. Collective evil is almost never a chant. It is the absence of an objection.
The structure is intact today; only the chain has been stretched until it is out of sight—cobalt in the phone, cheap clothes, the delivery rider's time, somebody else's energy supply. Lengthening the chain does not change the structure; it only changes how many steps you must take before you meet the woman at the end of it. Saramago's method is to shorten the chain to the length of a corridor and make you eat the meal in the same room.
That closing line has travelled a long way, and it lands like a blow. Its force comes from turning the book around on the reader: real blindness is not damaged eyes, it is being able to see and declining to look—at the people behind the numbers in the news, at the situations you pass every day, at what is happening in your own house. It is a claim about moral attention, and attention genuinely is chosen, which means it can genuinely be held against you.
But the rebuttal deserves full weight. "We are all blind" is a sentence with a congenital defect: it puts everybody in the same position, so nobody in particular is guilty. The accounts in this book are not evenly split. The man with the gun and the man handing over his watch are not equivalent; the woman who acts and the men who stay silent are not equivalent; the sentry firing and the thief crawling towards him are not equivalent. Chant "we are all blind" and those differences dissolve—and dissolving them is the most comfortable form of evasion there is. The second defect is more technical: using a real disability as the figure for moral failure sews "cannot see" onto "is bad", which is precisely what blind people's organisations have objected to in this novel and its film version for years.
How to read it without buying it cheap? Perhaps as a prompt rather than a conclusion. Its valuable use is not sighing that humanity is blind; it is naming something specific each time: right now I can see, I am able to act, and the thing I am choosing not to look at is—what? If you can name it, the sentence has weight. If you cannot, it is only a phrase that makes you feel clear-eyed—and feeling clear-eyed is the least safe condition anyone is in inside this book.
Line his books up and one method repeats with great consistency: remove one standing rule from the world, then stand still and watch people build a new one. This book removes sight. The Stone Raft breaks the Iberian peninsula off Europe and floats it into the Atlantic. In Death with Interruptions, people in one country simply stop dying, and the undertakers go bankrupt and the church falls into crisis. In The History of the Siege of Lisbon, a proofreader inserts one unauthorised "not" into a history book. His novels are controlled experiments: the conditions are absurd, the human response must be realistic.
The second obsession is the unnamed. His protagonists are rarely great figures—a proofreader, a clerk in a registry office, a potter, a doctor's wife. He wants to know whether ordinary people pushed to the limit can keep hold of the thing he calls being human, and his answer is usually stingy: yes, but only a very few can, at high cost, and possibly with nobody ever knowing.
The third is his hostility to authority, God included. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ writes Christ as a man used as an instrument by God, and the uproar drove Saramago to an island. The church scene in this book is that same offence extended—not a declaration that God does not exist, but a blindfold over his eyes, so that he can see no more than anyone else.
There is a sequel: Seeing (2004). The same city, a general election some years later, and the overwhelming majority of voters cast blank ballots. The government treats this as an insurrection—curfews, informers, a hunt for the ringleader—and the hunt ends up at the door of the woman who did not go blind. Read together, the political verdict is complete: the blind are abandoned, and the one who can see is hunted down.
This is one of the few contemporary novels praised and protested with equal energy. Honestly, then:
1 · The catastrophe is neutral: the disease takes the doctor, the thief and the soldier alike. So none of the evil in this book can be charged to it.
2 · The fuse is not the blindness. It is the order—put people who cannot see one another somewhere nobody is responsible, and post a machine gun at the gate.
3 · The collapse starts with sanitation, not morality: the first line of dignity is whether you can wash your hands.
4 · Ward three is not savagery, it is an institution: violence, monopoly, currency, a ledger, a published tariff, and an accountant keeping the books in braille.
5 · A pair of scissors settles the leader, and the next day the ledger and the tariff are unchanged. What you can kill is a man, never the notebook.
6 · There had been nobody at the gate for days. What kept them inside was their belief that order still existed outside it.
7 · The only happiness in the book is three women washing in the rain: when nobody is watching, people rot—and people also stop performing.
8 · The one who can see is not granted a privilege. She is sentenced to witness, and issued the right to kill with no one able to judge her.
9 · "Blind people who can see and do not look" is worth something only when you can name the specific thing you are declining to look at right now.
10 · On the last page the white that was poured into a stranger's eyes fills the whole sky. My turn, she thinks—then lowers her head, and the city is still there.