Inside us there is something that has no name and that something is what we are

“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”

I think that it’s not public the great affection that I have for the Portuguese writer José Saramago. For my family it’s very much of “she likes reading” and I know that if I asked to my closest relatives, as my mother or my sister, five books that I own, they wouldn’t know how to answer. My cousin would say easily 20 bands that I like and my other cousin knows instantly if I like or not of something to wear, for example, but with books it seems that it’s something completely apart. So, for them, I can have all Saramago books or all the Nicholas Sparks romances that the difference wouldn’t be much. I have some friends that also read, that gave and receive books, that know the latest titles and that, but I think that only two read Saramago and like it. It’s so common to hear that Saramago books are boring and hard to read and so rare hear someone enthusiastically talking about his stories. I can think “well, maybe it’s just people of my age that don’t read much Saramago, or my circle of friends”, and hope that be that, but there’s an image that I have in my mind of him (completely alone in a table in a book fair, in Lisbon) that takes me back to the other feeling.

He creates the most unpredictable situations and simply put humans reacting to them. Saramago stories should be discussed at TV, at radio, at school, everywhere, “and if people stop dying from one day to another?”, “and if suddenly we all stop seeing?”, “what if one woman could truly see a person’s interior?”, “how would we react if we found out someone exactly like us?”. “what can happen when a man changes just one word in a book that is read to be published?”, “if we had the opportunity, would we like to have a 7-days notice before the moment where we die?”, … To read Saramago is a mental exercise. How many times did I read the same sentence? How many times I went back to understand what was there at my front? His stories open new worlds and new possibilities for me, talk to me of humanity, of the very basic instincts, of good, of bad, of people as they are, with no colourful tricks, of things that are beneath.

“Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters.”

A few times ago I spent some days in the Pyrenees and I took a Saramago’s book that it was read a little bit almost every day aloud, and I can’t take out of my mind this image, of getting to a mountain refuge at the end of the day, perfect weather and wonderful places, and be sited on a stone resting and hearing (or reading if it was my time) his story, with my eyes closed. I haven’t read or heard anything aloud since my early school years and it was so good to discover that little pleasure.

Something to read more and more in these 1001 days =)

“The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed. It was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quartenary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as then social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny. Add to this general observation, the particular circumstance that in simple spirits, the remorse caused by committing some evil act often becomes confused with ancestral fears of every kind, and the result will be that the punishment of the prevaricator ends up being, without mercy or pity, twice what he deserved.”