The Notebook. José Saramago
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in life that constitutes terror, despair and agony—in other words, human nature. I think that after all it might be better to leave things as they are. Like most of the best ideas, mine is impracticable. So be it.
September 24: Divorces and Libraries
On two occasions in recent years—or it might have been three—I have been approached at the Lisbon Book Fair by readers, in twos and threes, weighed down by dozens of new volumes, freshly purchased, usually still in their plastic wrappers. I asked the first of these who approached me what seemed the most logical question: whether he had come across my work recently and, it would appear, been overwhelmed by it. He replied no, that he had been reading my work for a long time but that he had got divorced, and his ex-wife—another enthusiastic reader—had taken the dismantled family’s library with her into her new life. It then occurred to me, and I wrote a few lines about this in the old Lanzarote Notebooks, that it would be interesting to study the subject from the point of view of what I described at the time as the significance of divorces in the multiplication of libraries. I acknowledge that this was a somewhat provocative idea, which was why I let it go, to save myself from accusations of putting my own material interests before others’ marital harmony. I don’t know, I can’t imagine, how many conjugal splits have led to the formation of new libraries without any harm befalling the old ones. Two or three cases—which are as many as I’m aware of—were not enough to make a summer, or, to spell it out, they were not enough to improve either the publisher’s profits nor the royalties I was able to extract.
What I frankly never expected was that the economic crisis that has kept us in a state of permanent alarm should have made divorces even more difficult, and therefore incidentally slowed down the intended arithmetical progression of libraries—and I’m sure we’d all agree that this represents a real crime against culture. What is to be said, for example, about the complex, often insoluble problem of finding a homebuyer nowadays? If so many divorce proceedings are stalled, if court cases do not go ahead, then this alone is the real reason. Worse still, how should one proceed against certain examples of scandalous behavior already in the public domain, such as the (regrettably common and utterly immoral) case of a couple still living in the same house, perhaps not sleeping in the same bed but using the same library? There is no longer any respect, no longer any sense of decorum—this is the wretched situation we have come to. No one ever says that Wall Street is to blame: in the television comedies they finance there is never a book to be seen.
September 25: Nothing but Appearances
I suppose that right at the very beginning, before we invented speech, which is, as we know, the supreme creator of uncertainties, we were not troubled by any serious doubts about who we were or about our personal and collective relationship with the place where we found ourselves. Of course, the world could only be what our eyes saw from one moment to the next and—which was equally significant information—what the remaining senses—hearing, touch, smell, taste—were able to perceive of it, too. In its earliest phase, the world was nothing but appearances and nothing but surface. Matter was rough or smooth, bitter or sweet, acidic or bland, noisy or silent, scented or odorless. All things were just what they seemed, simply because there was no reason for them to seem one thing and to be altogether another. In those most ancient of days it never occurred to us that matter was porous. Today, however, even though we know that from the smallest of viruses to the universe as a whole we are all no more than compositions of atoms, and that inside them, beyond the mass that is inherent to them and defines them, there is still enough space for emptiness (absolute density doesn’t exist; everything is permeable), we still—just like our ancestors in their caves—continue to learn about, identify, and recognize the world according to the way it repeatedly shows itself to us. I would imagine that the spirits of philosophy and of science must have appeared one day when someone suspected that although this appearance was an external image that could be captured by consciousness and used as a map of knowledge, it could also be a delusion of the senses. We all know the popular expression derived from this realization, though it is more often used to refer to the moral world than the physical one: “Appearances can mislead.” Or deceive, which comes to the same thing. There would be no shortage of examples had we but space for them.
This scribbler has always worried about what is hidden behind mere appearances, and I’m not talking now about atoms or sub-particles. What I am talking about are current, common, everyday questions about, for example, the political system that we call democracy, the system that Churchill described as “the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” He didn’t say it was good, only the least bad. One might say that we consider the government we can see to be more than sufficient, and I think this is an error of perception for which—without our noticing—we are paying the price every day. This is a subject to which I will return.
September 26: The Whiteness Test
According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, or to attacks upon his honor and reputation.” And further, “Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” That’s what it says. The piece of paper shows, among others, the signature of the representative of the United States, which thereby acknowledged the commitment of the United States to the effective fulfillment of the articles contained in this Declaration; however, to their shame and our own, these articles are worthless, especially when the very law that is supposed to protect us not only does not do so but is used to justify the most senseless acts, including those that this same Article 12 condemns. To the United States, any person, whether an immigrant or a simple tourist, and regardless of his profession, is a potential delinquent who is obliged, like Kafka’s hero, to prove his innocence without knowing the charge of which he stands accused. Honor, dignity, reputation—these are words that provoke nothing but laughter from the Cerberuses who guard the entrances to the country. We already know this, we have already experienced it in deliberately humiliating interrogations, we’ve already been looked at by the official in charge as if we were the most repulsive of worms. In short, we have already become used to being mistreated.
But something new is happening now, a further turn of the oppressor’s screw. The White House, which houses the most powerful man on the planet, as journalists are prone to say when suffering from a crisis of inspiration—the White House, I say again, has authorized officers of the border police to inspect and scrutinize the documents of any foreign citizen or North American, even if they have no reason to suspect this person of any intention of participating in a crime. Such documents will be retained “for a reasonable period of time” in a vast library where all manner of personal data are kept, from simple address books to supposedly confidential e-mails. There, too, will be kept an incalculable quantity of copies of hard disks from our computers each time we present ourselves at any of the borders of the United States. With all their contents: scientific, technological, or creative research work, academic theses, simple love poems. “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy,” says poor old Article 12. To which we say, see how little the signature of a president of the most powerful democracy in the world is worth.
So there it is. We are trying out an infallible whiteness test on the United States, and this is what we have ascertained: it is not merely dirty, it is absolutely filthy.
29 September: Clear as Water
As has always been the case, and as will always be the case, the central question concerning any kind of human social organization, and the one from and into which all others flow, is the question of power, and the theoretical and practical problem we are presented with is identifying who holds it, discovering how they attained it, checking what use they make of it, by what means and for what