In 1990, during a trip to Rome, José Saramago suffered a detached retina - a sudden and potentially serious episode that threatens vision and requires urgent intervention. For the writer, the experience was not just a medical event, but a revelation. It was at that moment that he realized, with disturbing clarity, that blindness was real and possible.
Shortly afterwards, while having lunch alone in a restaurant, he asked himself a seemingly simple question: "What if we were all blind?". The answer, for Saramago, was immediate and unsettling: "In a way, we already are." From there came the germ of one of his most striking works - Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (1995), a brutal and poetic novel that questions the human condition, the fragility of civilization and what is left of humanity when sight disappears.
Saramago considered this book to be "the path from statue to stone", a symbolic inversion: from the finished form (the statue) to the raw state (the stone), in a return to essence. Paradoxically, it was the threat of physical darkness that lit a powerful literary light in him. Blindness, in this case, was not the end, but the starting point for seeing better - and for making us see, with new eyes, the world we thought we knew.
Inês Leal
