The End of the World with Michael and Stu
The Apocalypse is Everywhere. The End of the World with Michael and Stu is a (hopefully) insightful and (hopefully) humorous exploration of the rise of apocalyptic news, apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic culture. Each week, we’ll be looking at a work of art, a piece of media, or an historical event related to the (hopefully not) impending End of the World.
The End of the World with Michael and Stu
136: Blinded by the Light
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This week we are discussing José Saramago's 1995 novel Blindness. We consider what the central theme of the novel, a world in which virtually everyone suddenly goes blind, says about the way society is set up and how quickly it might descend into chaos were such an event to occur. We also compare Saramago's style with that of Thomas Bernhard, whose prose we determine to be "even more exhausting" than that of Saramago. Michael also offers up one of his patented hypotheticals about a key moment in the book. It's all here!
This episode contains spoilers for Blindness.
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All right, everybody, welcome back. This is the end of the world with Michael and Stu. I'm Michael. And I'm Stu, and today we are talking about a novel that is, in fact, a masterpiece. It's by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Josse Saramago. Oh, he got it. He did, he did. He he slipped in under the wire. I think he lived a decade after he got it. But he got it not long after this novel came out. I think this novel comes out in '95 and in Portugal.
SPEAKER_00And is it sort of put him over the top?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's one of the books that is cited in his, you know, in the in the award. So it may this may have been the last push over the cliff, uh, as they say in uh Spinal Tap. And yeah, he won the Nobel Prize in '98. Uh, I believe the novel was translated into English in '97. The translator died apparently while revising the trans the translation.
SPEAKER_00Oh no.
SPEAKER_01Which I saw as a little note, but it was finished. He was just, you know, tightening the ship, so to speak. Uh uh, he was in the lab, you know, mixing up a few last edits. Uh, but it was basically done and uh and and very well done. Uh you've read this before, you said Michael. I had I had in fact not read it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean it's been a minute, probably 15 years ago, 10 years ago, maybe. Okay. Um I remember it as being particularly uh bleak, and uh uh yeah, I I wasn't wrong. I guess I did I did glean something from it. You got the darkness. It is kind of yeah, I I think the book is is obviously pretty pretty amazing, but it is it is it is incredibly exhausting. Um, you know, we chose to do this kind of last week. We've been toying with it for a while, but then we found a time to maybe, oh, I think I might have enough time to read something. Let's do that. And yeah, there's something about reading this in a matter of days that I don't know, I would compare it to like I remember watching the first season of Severance. I told you this story, right? Where it's like you just certain things you just need to be doing sporadically, um, or even consistently, but like once a week watching an episode of Severance feels different than just being bludgeoned by it. And this book really does bludgeon you. I mean, it there is no uh there's no B story where some hero is really laying the groundwork to save the day, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that that's certainly the case. Uh, I didn't have that experience at all, but maybe that's just because I'm so dark and just bleak. All right, I'm just basically living in a cave surrounded by bats and monsters. But uh I was more, I guess, just kind of entranced by the stylistic relentlessness of the novel, that the way it just kind of keeps going, it rolls into one thing. It's a little bit like Thomas Bernhardt, but without uh Bernhardt is always all of his novels are in the first person, and it's a kind of crazed individual ranting about their obsessions for 300 pages. This isn't quite that I've only read Correction, which is my favorite, of course.
SPEAKER_00Uh it is uh even more exhausting than blindness, though. I would much more.
SPEAKER_01I mean, correction is like I think correction is the most exhausting of his many exhausting.
SPEAKER_00Correction, I like I remember the sensation of reading it sort of more than the book itself.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah. I mean, Roy Tamer and and Ho Holler, who's like the the taxidermist who's stuffing that really awful, terrible black bird as the narrator is trying to get Roy Tamer's papers to go. Well, we'll do a correction episode eventually. I used to teach correction. Students uh did not read it as far as I could tell. Uh before we get into a little recap of what happens in blindness, I thought I would uh remind everyone that if you like the show, you can follow us on the podcatcher of your choice. If you really like the show, you can leave us a rating andor review on that podcatcher. And we also encourage you to follow us on Instagram at the end of the worldwms, where we post scintillating reels from the show.
SPEAKER_00Teasers sometimes about what's coming.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, often teasers. That's it's definitely not something we just talk about and never do. That would be insane. So uh Sodomago had a long life. He lived from 22, 1922 to 2010. So it's a solid 88 years, it's Thomas Hardy age. Um esque Yeah, he's a little different artist than Hardy, but he Hardy is pretty bleak too, so that they share that. Um this novel, yeah, this was kind of the thing that pushed him over the top for the Nobel, perhaps. Uh, we've got a pretty cool setup. It basically just dives right into it, right? I mean, there's no bit of like a leftovers feel to the very beginning. I thought of that, and I thought I thought of that as well, and I also thought this is a good way to start a novel. It you know, it just happens, and there's no I was born and blah blah blah, you know, there's no like long pre preamble. Another interesting aspect of the of the novel is no characters have names. Yes, everyone is either identified by their profession, their relationship to another character, or by a physical attribute, which is very interesting because the novel is about a group of people, except for one, who cannot see. Yeah, and yet throughout, we're always hearing about the girl with the dark glasses, the man with the eye patch, the the boy with the squint. And it's like the only person who can register these aspects of them is the the doctor's wife, who's the one character who perhaps in the whole city, country, world we don't know how big this thing, this thing got, um, can still see. Who knows how far this goes. Yeah, we don't know. We're through the looking glass people. So Amanda struck blind at a traffic light, doesn't know why. This blindness is unique. Normally, I suppose I'm not blind, so I can't really speak to this, but apparently, most blind people what they see is just darkness, right? But in but in the case of this novel, the blindness is uh white, so you just see a kind of glaring, impenetrable, milky, bright white all the time. I imagine that would be worse. It sounds worse to me, right? Because it it's uh it's like you're blind, but you're also seeing something that's oppressive in your blindness. Um so there's a pretty good run of you, you kind of get the lay of the land of the novel pretty quickly early on. The guy gets helped home, his car is sort of abandoned in in a nearby street, and he gets helped home by a seeming good Samaritan who even offers, hey, I'll stay here until your wife gets off work and like make sure you're okay. And he's like, No, no, I'll be fine. And the good Samaritan then, of course, just steals his car.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, this this like little microcosm at the beginning, I think, really is effective at bringing you in, right? The the choice of sort of showing the impact on in in on a time on on the the most the smallest possible level, but using sort of transportation and the inconvenience of that, and then the way that you need to rely on others, but those people are going to take advantage of you. You know, it all just basically spills out uh and then it just kind of keeps moving outward for the entire novel.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there's waves of people afflicted by this because very soon thereafter the man's wife returns. She's annoyed at him at first because he's knocked some stuff over in their house, but then she learns, Oh my god, he's blind. So they rush to the uh ophthalmologist, which is when they discover their car has been stolen, so they have to take a taxi. Um the ophthalmologist is who's gonna be one of our main characters as well, um can't find anything physically wrong with this guy. He's all the results are normal, the eyes seem to respond in the ways you'd expect.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01And yet it's very clear to everyone the man's not it's not a psycho. Yeah, it's not just a purely psychosomatic issue or something. Um but it is uh uh uh confounding. The next thing we see is that the doctor goes home at night and is reading about what could the possible explanation for this be when he too is struck blind. We have a little vignette where we cut away to the car thief who's driving off to fence his car, and he too is struck blind, right? Uh not long after the the first blind man, as he's called, his wife also is struck blind. The government decides that this is some kind of unforeseen or heretofore not encountered contagious blindness. So they make the very wise decision to just intern all the blind people and anyone exposed to the a blind person in uh an old m abandoned mental hospital, which goes great. And we spend the majority of the novel in the mental hospital. That's right. Um what do you think about this? Uh I thought this was interesting. I mean, Portugal, or presumably this is sad, is a country that was fascist for longer than any other country in Europe, right? Oh, really? Yeah, I think from the early 30s until the late 70s, it was a fascist, you know, and it didn't it it kind of dissolved. It didn't uh you know what I mean? It wasn't like overthrown by an outside force, which is the case in most fascist regimes, right?
SPEAKER_00Um they were just like, I think we should take the foot off the gas a little bit.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, on fascism. Yeah. I mean, they I mean because the Spain, what happened is Spain stopped being fascist, and then they were like, uh our borders are all with Spain, you know. They had a nice little Iberian fascist bloc there for you know a good 45 years. Right. But I was wondering about that because of the presence of the military and the kind of compliance of people, as compared with, say, uh the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
SPEAKER_00Sure. Yeah, I mean it's definitely an interesting uh part of reading this for the second time, sort of after COVID. Yeah, right. Yeah. Um but I you know, in the world of the novel, I guess it it's weird because it, you know, I I agree that obviously it takes place somewhere, but it doesn't ever feel yeah, it's non-specific. Yeah, and it doesn't even feel quite of directly of the world, if that makes sense. It just it feels more like a um uh uh an ex more explicit thought experiment to me, this novel, in a way. Yeah, that's and the way the way the government reacts, um, I don't know. I mean, I think in the beginning it it it sort of makes sense, no?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think the problem is that obviously if it is a contagion, it's already broken containment long before you're attempting, right? Because who how many people, how close do you have to be to be infected? You know, we there's just no information about any of that. And by by the time of time has passed by the time you know, enough time has passed that there might be every scientist is blind and cannot do the re you know uh it's one of the ironies of this scenario. I guess also the fact that the victims of this illness are blind, which puts them at a significant disadvantage as far as being rounded up by non-blind uh military officers, right? So we we have our kind of core group that forms in the mental hospital, they're all the first to arrive in this one ward. There is the doctor, the ophthalmologist, his wife. His wife is not blind, she does not go blind. We do not know why. And I don't think there are any other non-blind characters in the novel.
SPEAKER_00And she goes in. Explain what why does she go in?
SPEAKER_01I mean, basically, they're separating people who've been exposed from people who are already blind. Yeah. And she decides it would just be better to stay with her husband rather than go into the adjacent ward for the potentially blind, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, do you think knowing what she knows now, she would have made that decision?
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, they the the other people in the other ward all end up going blind before the place really goes to hell, or do you think she would have just stayed outside is what you're suggesting?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, right?
SPEAKER_01Like she's right, that's what I'm saying. She's already like been kind of snared in the Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So you're either choosing basically the proximity and to be able to take care of your your husband, or hope for the best in the other ward where people are already also going blind, right?
SPEAKER_01And are, yeah. I mean, this is this is not gonna go well either way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So they basically they get there's there's the I'll I'll just go through a list of characters, see if I can do it from memory. There's the the doctor, the doctor's wife, there's the first blind man and his wife. There's a kid who was a patient at the doctor's clinic when the first blind man came in. There's a girl who's sort of a sex worker.
SPEAKER_00She's not exactly a sex worker, but she's sort of No, as as with as with most uh people in this, everything is very vague.
SPEAKER_01Everything you learned about them, everything you know about the She was also in she had uh conjunctivitis and was getting eye drops. She has she's a girl with glasses, but she went blind while she was having sex with another man who who later comes into the ward also is like it was the damnedest thing. Like this lady, I was like, Yeah, but she but she he doesn't know she's there. She's scene where she hides her glasses from her linings, I suppose. And I think he's one of the people that dies in one of the various uprisings. Um the car thief is an early character, yeah, you know, and the blind, the first blind man is is quite angry. Later, uh an old an old man with an eye patch comes in, and that sort of rounds out our group.
SPEAKER_00Um and they seem to develop an affinity just from being the first group, in a sense, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that makes sense, right? Yeah, it's like if you're the first people, like when I played football in high school, we would always come back early as a group, and so we were like the only ones on campus for the first week or something, and then it was like the rest of the people would come back, and it was like, ah, who are these newcomers or whatever?
SPEAKER_00Sure, and there's a sense of like shared experience compared with the people who are funneling in as the days or however much time is going by, which is also somewhat unclear.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, being at boarding school was rather similar to being trapped in an abandoned mental hospital. And I don't mean to imply that I was really that friendly with most of the other football players. I think that would be a misrepresentation of reality. Never mind, never mind. So things there's not really a great system in place for helping these people because anyone that might help them, be they the military guards who are literally armed and shooting people that try and escape to the outside, um, none of them want to go blind, so they all need to stay at a safe what they think is a safe distance.
SPEAKER_00And as the situation worsens on the outside, the desire to help them obviously plummets very, very quickly.
SPEAKER_01Right. So like food is dropped off once a day. Um some toiletries are dropped off once a day, but there aren't really I mean, this isn't a place designed for the blind, so there aren't any like handrails that lead you to the bathroom. You know, there's like no sis, there's no system, and I think this like lack of a system is one of the themes of the novel, right? How quickly once blindness sets in, the system vanishes.
SPEAKER_00Any well, I think that that brings up an interesting question that I think um I'm I'm still somewhat unclear about, so maybe you you have a take on it. Sure. Um okay, so they're in there, right? This this little group forms, but obviously the situation is unfolding and worsening, and that's clear to clear to them, right? At least from the duration of their blindness, the duration of being in this place, the worsening conditions. And you know, eventually the wife of the doctor has to come to believe that for for whatever reason she's immune, at least for the time being. Yeah, yeah. And she doesn't tell anybody.
SPEAKER_01The doctor knows.
SPEAKER_00But like that right, but like she doesn't tell the group.
SPEAKER_01No, not until much later in the novel.
SPEAKER_00Right, not until much later. And so although she does show a very real affinity for these people, and I guess what I'm wondering is why do you think after let's say a few days, she doesn't just explain to this group of people that she can help them through this because she can see?
SPEAKER_01I think she feels guilty about being able to see, right? There's a quote from the novel. She says, for the it says, for the first time since she'd arrived there, the doctor's wife felt as if she were behind a microscope and observing the behavior of a number of human beings who did not even suspect her presence. And this suddenly struck her as being contemptible and obscene.
SPEAKER_00I have no So tell them then.
SPEAKER_01I have no right to look if the others cannot see me, she thought to herself. With a shaky hand, the girl applied a few eye drops. This would always allow her to say that these were not tears running from her eyes, right? It's like uh I think she feels like she becomes a commodity if she reveals her sightedness. And everyone would be demanding things of her at all times, right?
SPEAKER_00That's it it's interesting, right? It's like it's almost like a comparison to you know something we talk about on the podcast a lot about sort of individual responsibility under sort of the weight of sort of catastrophe or decline. Yeah, exactly. And and you know, she does a very good job. The character is uh, you know, quite quite an amazing uh person.
SPEAKER_01I mean, is the protagonist of the novel.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but at the same time, it does a really good job of, you know, I asked that question just because I, you know, I wonder what sort of you think you would do, but also like it the book does a very good job of not making you feel any contempt for the fact that she doesn't do that. No, you kind of you kind of get it. Yeah, right?
SPEAKER_01It's a little weird. I don't entirely know why. So a couple things happen early on. The car thief tries to grope the girl with the uh dark glasses, she kicks him in the thigh with her stiletto heel, gives him a grievous, what turns out to be fatal wound because sanitary conditions in this hospital are terrible and there aren't adequate toilet areas. Pretty soon everyone is just shitting out in the yard, so to speak. And when people die, sometimes they're left just rotting in the yard until someone has the wherewithal to bury it, right? It's it gets really bad really quickly. And the car thief, before he dies, he's he goes out and does essentially kind of suicide by cop. He he crawls out to where the army guys are, yeah, thinking, Oh, I'm so badly injured, they'll like take pity on me and take me to the hospital. That does not happen, they just shoot him and he dies. But before he goes, he tells the doctor's wife, I know you can still see. Like he's figured it out, and she says, That's ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00But I mean, again, like just to go back to that point briefly, I mean, I think that what's really effective about having this person sort of mitigating sort of where she can, but also fully becoming aware of the scale of the issue and how far outside her own capabilities it is. It's yeah, it's interesting in like in the time, living in a time of sort of widespread ignorance, right? The ability to see um is is again, it's like crushed under that weight of unseen. Right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's I think that's nicely said. And yeah, it reminds me of like the social cost of activism, which I've talked about on pod before, but like, is it worth it to scold your friend for not recycling in the grand scheme of things? Or like a single can or something. You see them throw it in the trash.
SPEAKER_00But even that, like when there's enough blindness going around, right? It's like at a certain point, you know, like I I I had the thought reading this of like um listening to Bobby Jr. go off, right?
SPEAKER_02Sure.
SPEAKER_00And you're just you're just like, this is insane. This is just obviously not correct, real, helpful. It's probably dangerous, right? And a bunch of people think that. But if enough people just don't bother seeing that, it doesn't matter ultimately, right? This man can still function in in his role, as dysfunctional as he may be. You see what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Or Trump, right? I mean, true.
SPEAKER_00I guess to me, I mean the Bobby just like jumps out because this seems very related to like health and yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's fair. So very quickly, the wards are overfilled because everyone's going blind all over the city. The troops that are guarding them are going blind one by one. Uh, the ward is eventually filled past capacity. It's but it's built for 240 people, but there's 300 plus people in there. It's a sanitary nightmare. The military have this debate about whether it wouldn't be better to just murder all the blind people at once and then be done with it. The guy who suggests that interestingly goes blind the next day. Uh there's a quote from that. He says, I suppose we'll all be contaminated. There cannot be a single person who's not been within sight of a blind man. This is interesting. They have this theory that what causes you to go blind is being seen by the eyes of someone who's already blind, which I love. Because it's like, what? If a blind man cannot see, I ask myself, how can he transmit this disease through his sight, general? This must be the most logical illness in the world. The eye that is blind transmit the blindness to the eye transmits the blindness to the eye that sees. What could be simpler? And then he says, we have a colonel here who believes the solution would be to shoot the blind as soon as they appear, and then that colonel, of course, um goes blind the next day. Uh corpses instead of blind men could would scarcely improve the situation. Then this great thing to be bl to be blind is not the same as being dead, yes, but to be dead is to be blind. I love that kind of uh little linguistic game. So they don't have a solution, and as I said, the military are quickly going blind at the same rate, although they have a separate military blind can't blindness camp we we hear about. Uh eventually a gang emerges where a cadre of blind people, one of whom has a gun, yeah, start extorting everyone else in the ward and they they steal the food and then they won't give it out unless you give all your valuables to them.
SPEAKER_00Uh, it seems like a pretty natural evolution of the situation.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's all very Hobbes, right? I mean, I I was thinking of Hobbes and Rousseau, right? If we think of the blindness epidemic as kind of unwinding civilization, it seems that Saromago is like more on the Hobbes side of things. We're all living in peace and harmony, right? There's some of that too, but for the most part. Uh, this gang also starts going from ward to ward and raping all the women as well, which is when things really descend into that kind of hellish nightmare, and this that feels like they're in hell, which leads the doctor's wife to take her scissors and actually murder the guy with the gun. She stabs him as he's attempting to assault her. And this throws everything into chaos. A blind accountant gets the gun, but he uses it too much. He's shooting it off left and right, and this actually diminishes his authority. And I thought of the sort of Iraq Iran war in relation to this.
SPEAKER_00Interesting.
SPEAKER_01Uh, like everything else in his life, this too has its explanation, which is that after the tragic death of the gang's first leader, all spirit of discipline or sense of obedience had gone in the ward. The serious error on the part of the blind accountant, that's the new guy with the gun, was to have thought that it was enough to take possession of the gun in order to usurp power, but the result was exactly the opposite. Each time he fires, the shot backfires. In other words, with each shot fired, he loses a little more authority. So let's see what happens when he runs out of ammunition. Also, like blowing up the boats in the Caribbean, like, oh, look at how powerful we are. We can like blow up. This doesn't actually create power. What no, it actually shows like a smallness, a profound weakness, right? And insecurity.
SPEAKER_00And I think the Iran war is like that too, where it's just like Yeah, and I think I in a way I think the the sort of efforts in the hemisphere are are more are are even more accurate to this idea. Right. You just shouldn't you if you were powerful, you wouldn't have to do any of this.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01You wouldn't have to invade anyone. You'd have other other means of getting this done. Politics by other means, as as we used to say. Well, I guess that was war, but by other other means, perhaps.
SPEAKER_00By other other other means.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. So the gang falls pretty soon after this, there's a fire that burns the whole hospital down.
SPEAKER_00And actually, before you before you go into that, because that kind of brings about a new phase of things. Yeah, yeah. I want to I want to offer like a hypothetical situation here.
SPEAKER_01I'm ready.
SPEAKER_00Okay, where we're gonna place it for the purposes of making I think the the decision or telling, okay, we're gonna place this on the heels of the doctor's wife murdering the man with the gun and the blind accountant taking over. Okay. So here's the first, here's the hypothetical. So let's say, Stu, you are in fact the doctor's wife.
unknownOkay?
SPEAKER_01Paradise, my dream at last.
SPEAKER_00You can see, as we've covered. No one else can see, okay? Now you have found out that the pandemic, epidemic, is starting to spread outside the mental asylum, right? You have no conception for how bad it's gonna get, but it doesn't seem like it's getting any better. Okay. You now learn for a fact that you can stop whatever is spreading outside. So you have no idea how bad it is, you know, have no idea how widespread. It could be just the military guys, it could be just right, you got no idea it could be the whole world. Okay, but the only way that you can stop it is that every day you have to kill one of the people in your group. And only when they are all dead will it stop.
unknownWhat?
SPEAKER_01So you've met you've met them, okay? You mean like my friends, my husband, all these people?
SPEAKER_00It's the group we're talking about. The group in the book.
SPEAKER_01The main characters, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the main the main characters.
SPEAKER_01So we got a group of And if you kill them all, the pandemic's over.
SPEAKER_00So it's gonna keep going for five. It's the the damage will still be done to you don't know if those people are outside who get it will ever be able to see again, right? The amount of damage being done to society, the trust veneer of civilization is still collapsing. But after you have killed your group, then it will stop. Everyone will be able to see again, the damage will still be done, right?
SPEAKER_01That did occur. But everyone who's in the world will be able to see again.
SPEAKER_00They will be able to see again, but you don't know how many people are actually blind, right? At this point, sure. But like you don't know if it's the whole world yet. So there's still something very real at stake, right? It could just be this tiny area. Would you do that? No, you would not kill them. Like if you knew for a fact that after that five-day run, you've committed these five murders. Okay, it would all be over. You would just be like, let's just see how this goes.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00After everything you've seen up until this point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, this isn't. You're basically just asking me, it's like a trolley problem. Am I willing to murder five people I know to save untold people I don't know? And the answer is no. But you're in the thick of it, right? Like you're in the thick of it, and I just killed someone I don't know, and I don't like it at all.
SPEAKER_00But probably, if you're thinking at that point, now you have to try to put yourself in the mind space of this person. You have to probably believe that this is going to end in the death of these five people, anyway.
SPEAKER_01Sure. But isn't it better to just ride the ride the snake? The snake is long, seven miles, to quote Jim Morrison, right? Just to like keep going.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, fair enough.
SPEAKER_01Fair enough. Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_00Let me ask you, what if you had to explain it to them up front?
SPEAKER_01About that, I'm gonna kill them? Yes. Well, I think it's very different if they volunteer to be killed.
SPEAKER_00But they would probably be willing to.
SPEAKER_01The problem with this hypothetical is like, on what authority can I declare that this is the case? Well, we're we again, this is what we always get into. It's like a defending your life scenario, and you have to imagine that. Rip torn emerges and he's like, look, you have it, buddy, just shoot those people that you have the power to stop it. Right. But the problem with having the it on the true authority of God is like, does God come and tell everyone else that too?
SPEAKER_00But this is the problem, I think, with not like again, if we were This is the problem with authority as such, right? And the problem with not telling everyone right from get-go that you can see, right? Because then if you're still seeing at this point, you're probably gonna get some of these people starting to believe that you're a messianic figure.
SPEAKER_01That's correct. Which she totally avoids. Yeah, that's interesting. Uh yeah, okay, that does tie back into the actual novel in a way I was not anticipating. Um, but I still would feel uncomfortable killing people.
SPEAKER_00But you would take your shot of explaining it, is what you're saying, but you would only do it if everyone volunteered.
SPEAKER_01And if I also just knew it to be true, right? Yeah, but we're saying But then I'd probably kill myself at the end because I've just killed my husband and all the people I like.
SPEAKER_00That's gonna be rough for you. No one's doubting that. Like you're not coming out of this good shape, but the rest of the world would still survive at some level. Yeah, I don't know. It's tough. So there's a fire. I'm just gonna say, just to finish the Oh yeah, please. There's no way that I would do it. Yeah, I mean, right? No, there's no chance. I would just be like, I hope that this thing is.
SPEAKER_01Let's hope for the best let's hope for the best. Yeah, putting this on me, Michael, making me imagine killing my closest friends in the blind hospital ward. So they get out, uh, they leave she leads them out. There's like a human chain of her eyes leading everyone, and this is one of the uh images that recurs a lot in the latter part of the novel, where it's this idea that they're like one organism. Yeah, she is the sense organ, and everyone else is kind of like uh an appendage of varying use in various circumstances. Uh they find a dog uh the next day as they're wandering about the city. The dog likes to lick the woman's tears as she cries.
SPEAKER_00Dog of tears.
SPEAKER_01So it becomes the dog of tears, that's correct. They find a grocery basement uh that hasn't been looted, and they fill up on a bunch of food. They haven't eaten much in days after the rations had declined and the gang and the fire, you know. So the they're things are looking a little better. They get to the girl with the dark glasses' house. Her parents aren't there, but there's an old lady who's been living off like rabbits and hens in the yard, but everyone else in the building is gone. And the girl learns her parents were taken away soon after she was. They they hang out there. The old lady's funny character because she's she's like, You said you'd give me food, right? She's very like you can see that like any polite edges have really been worn off by this uh circumstance.
SPEAKER_00Which is why the the doctor's wife doesn't tell anybody about the groceries. Yeah. Well, she has them. Right. But the idea is that like I can't, you know, it will spark even more violence and chaos, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, she doesn't yeah. I mean, once they get to the safety of the apartment, I mean they tell the woman they can give her food, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, right, but it's all very internal. It's like I'm gonna keep this information and control the distribution of the food.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Uh eventually they uh get back to the their house, which is a little bigger, so there's a little more room for everyone. There's a range of let's go to my place.
SPEAKER_00I like this idea of just like going to each other's places when all of this sheer devastation is taking place. Well, by some miracle, they don't want to check on my place.
SPEAKER_01You know, I've watered my plants in weeks. Their place has not been looted, their their lock has held. A lot of places have been looted. And there's a big rainstorm where they wash for the first time, they're all covered in grime, and the the woman who can see the doctor's wife cleans the house a little bit and gathers water in these cisterns. And basically, these people now know that she can see, and they're really like dependent on her. As I said before, they're kind of like one organism with her as the head, essentially. And they go to the first blindman's house again, they're all just like checking up on their houses, as you said. It is very funny. They find that there's a writer there, and the writer's like his he's been staying there because he got thrown out by a gang from his house, right? So we're getting the sense that this sort of war of all against all and just utter chaos. Yeah, all the power doesn't work because no one can man the power plants. There's no running water, like every everything's really just gone to shit.
SPEAKER_00You know, yeah, and the writer is just left to like explain himself and fall on the mercy of these people.
SPEAKER_01Like, he's like, Well, why don't I you just is it okay if I stay here and you say where you're can I stay or what? And the writer, you know, the writer's like, yeah, now my work, my life's work is useless. You know, I was I was pretty famous, but like no one can read any of my work ever.
SPEAKER_00I'd be telling people I was such a famous writer in this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, actually, I'm Thomas Pynchon. Um may have heard of my book Vineland. Anyway, he's learning to write by touch. He's doing kind of like a primitive braille. Like he's he's it's kind of cool. They pass a square where doomsday prophets have emerged and they're talking about the end of the world. Shocking, shocking development. Um the girl with the eye patch or the girl with the dark glasses and the man with the eye patch are like, we're gonna live together. He's like, I'm in love with you. There's this very weird kind of plan for them to live together after. If if you know, in in the future, if this all works out, but he's like eight 70 years old and she's like 24. So it's all is blind, though. What's that? They're both blind. Love is blind, as I said, right? Uh they try and make another run to the grocery store, and there's kind of a weird thing happens where the doctor's wife goes towards the basement, but there's like this horrible stench, and there's like bodies, and then there's like this weird glowing light coming out of the under the door, which she thinks is like fumes from decomposing bodies within the basement. Uh, so even this place of refuge where they got food is no longer available to them. They go across the street, she's feeling lightheaded, so they go into this church, which is just crammed-filled, uh crammed to the brim with blind people, and all the icons in the church of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, they've all had paint put over their eyes, and all the statues have coverings on their eyes. And she remarks this to her husband, and they're like, Wait, how did you know that? How can you tell? She kind of has to be like, Well, do what I did, go feel with your hands, you'll see what I say is true.
SPEAKER_00And how did they get how did that happen?
SPEAKER_01Before people went blind, they were doing presumably the someone at the church before he lost or she lost their sight, did that.
SPEAKER_00I simply must get to the portrait.
SPEAKER_01It is a little weird, though. This is why I think this scene was like, all right, this is on the Iberian Peninsula, this like church covered with Catholic icons. This is this is not the kind of church you'd find in America. I mean, even a Catholic church in America would not be this, you know, gaudy, if you will. So, you know, they don't have that much food, but while the people are feeling the icons for themselves, they go around and steal all their food, which is like, what's what's going on? The dog is also with them and is eating their food. Um so they go home, and then that night, as they're like debating, should we leave the city, like what should we do with our lives? Um there's a lot of there's a lot of meditation about like organization, right? The worst thing is that we are not organized. There should be an organization in each building, in each street, in each district, a government, said the wife. An organization, the human body is also an organized system, it lives as long as it keeps organized, and death is only the effect of a disorganization. This is nothing to do with any of my work on cybernetics, obviously. And how can society of blind people organize itself in order to survive?
SPEAKER_00Like this, these are valid questions because, like, yeah, it's also an interesting like to turn it, you know, with what you were talking about, where you know, she can see is that like these small pockets of people can also become a body, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, exactly. Thanks to your eyes, uh, we are still alive, said the girl with the dark glasses. So they're they're really unsure. They're thinking maybe it better be in the country, the food would be fresher, they could like catch a goat and like milk it, they could get fruit off trees. It's like this is all none of this is feeling very sustainable. Like winter winter is coming, to quote uh George R. Martin, that great poet. But then that night, the first blind man goes to bed, and as he's closing his eyes, the light that he sees turns from light to dark, right? Which is the sign that he opens his eyes. Oh my god, I can see his vision has returned. And I like that then over the next couple days, everyone gets their sight back. Sure. And you're kind of like in the order that they became blind, right? Which makes it seem like it's a durational, like almost like it's an art project. Right.
SPEAKER_00Like, is it like a like a lesson teaching moment?
SPEAKER_01Right, it's like a well for 95, or but it's also like 40 days and 40 nights, it feels vaguely biblical.
SPEAKER_00I mean, you know, to go back just quickly to the the quote you just read, I mean, I think that's part of the point here is that obviously um talking a lot about sort of the inhumanity of of the distance of authority, right? And and not only that, the distance of your life and what you see and what power and violence is wrought um that you don't see, right? Yeah, um, and so this idea of keeping things close or organizations within buildings or within workforces, um, I think is is a is a huge point of the novel. I'm not sure there's really um what's the word, like a prescription for how to make things better, but there is clearly like this this warning of allowing power and authority and morality to be outsourced to a level where you can't see it on a day-to-day basis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think, I think, right. I think it's about democracy on a like more basic level and not you know just uh just having representation on every level of yeah. So after people get their sight back, it's like we don't really the novel pretty much ends like a page or two after they get their what else is there to say? Well, it'd be kind of interesting to see how people rebuild, right? I guess he did write a sequel. Um did you read seeing when we should we should read seeing? Yeah, I would I would definitely do it. Seeing feels like uh one of my abbreviations. Like it's like the last word of a longer title. Oh yeah, that's seeing. So I there's a quote towards the end. Why do we become blind? I don't know. Perhaps one day we'll find out. Do you want me to tell you what I think? Yes, do. I don't think we did 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, right? And this to me, like, was a little okay, I get it. Like because the whole blindness is clearly like an allegory for the ways in which we are blind to the ills in our society already, right? Like, yes, in this novel, society gets much worse because of the blindness epidemic. But in our society at present, it's already a lot of problems that we kind of just overlook, right? I mean, it's like you can go outside now and there are like homeless people begging on the street, lying on on you know, on lean twos and things. Right. I mean it's like horrible.
SPEAKER_00Right. And you know, all of us have some role uh and consumption of things that are by any sort of moral measure stolen, right? Of course, hoarding, all that type of thing. That type of stuff is happening.
SPEAKER_01Indigenous genocide. Like, I mean, it's just like, you know, we didn't maybe do this ourselves personally.
SPEAKER_00I found the ending. I mean, yeah, I I agree, but I I don't know. I feel like it was earned the kind of yeah slip.
SPEAKER_01No, I do too. I do too. It's fine, it's good, it's a good book. It's stylistically so propulsive and interesting.
SPEAKER_00It is, and again, it's not, it's it's hard to explain because it there is obviously a lot of like visceral and evocative imagery that you're dealing with when you read the book, but it does a good a good job, I think, of of um letting you know that it is an allegory, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I mean it's not too specific, it's not like the blindness is fascism. It's like, well, that's right. It's like that's part of it. It could, you know, that's an aspect of what leads to fascism and what leads to other forms of cruelty, but that it's not that it's not that reductive of an allegory, I guess we could say. But yeah, I really enjoyed this. Uh it was good to do it, good to read a book to talk about. Um, once again, we haven't done that in a little while. Probably do that sooner rather than later again.
SPEAKER_00Uh I guess I should probably start reading again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, reading's good. I've read more books this year now that I'm finally finished my uh dissertation, which was Yeah, I've read more books this year than in like the past ten years.
SPEAKER_00I think I've read three already.
SPEAKER_01I think I've read like thirty-five, maybe. Not that.
SPEAKER_00That's basically the same.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's not that many, but not that few either. Maybe maybe a few more than that. Meaning the most books you ever read in one year was. Probably like 180 or something. Wow. When I was a kid, I was insane about reading. I mean, not not all these. I wasn't just I wasn't reading like Don Quixote. It was a lot of junk, but but you know, I churned through. You could put up a number. A big number. Yeah. I was putting up numbers in the lab.
SPEAKER_00Speaking of um you and your prolific output, do you want to explain to the listeners what we'll be doing next week?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so next week we're gonna take a look at American Psycho. Uh not an explicitly apocalyptic. Well, it's pretty apocalyptic in its way. Yeah, I wasn't kidding.
SPEAKER_00What's that? I wasn't getting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, it's it's about, you know, it's uh we'll we'll talk about the movie primarily. I've also read the book recently, so maybe I'll bring in some contrast between the two. Uh, but I have another essay coming out that touches on American psycho, cybernetics, and safe, a film that we discussed earlier in so maybe I'll uh that'll be coming out next Wednesday. Um just tell people where they can that's at uh cybernetic observation, cyber observations.substack.com. I'm gonna have the website for that set up soon as well. There'll be a dedicated URL, which I've already procured.
SPEAKER_00But um as opposed to an undedicated one. This URL, it means business.
SPEAKER_01That's right. Uh so yeah, we'll be we'll talk about American Psycho, which is a fun, horrifying movie that I've seen many times. And so that'll be interesting. But until then, if you like the show, you know, you can follow us at the podcatcher of your choice, as I said before, and you can also uh leave us a rating andor review on that podcatcher and follow us on Instagram at the end of the worldwms. Um, blindness was good. I yeah, I really enjoyed this. I don't I feel like I'm not gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_00Definitely falls in the category, which is rare for the pod, but um I think firm a firm recommendation uh to that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's not very long, too.
SPEAKER_00It's I think it's 300 pages something heavy, but it's not linguistically dense or anything.
SPEAKER_01No, and it's fun, it's stylistically cool and has a real role to it. Alright, so American Psycho next time. And until then, this has been the end of the world with Michael and Stu. I'm Michael. And I'm Stu, and we'll talk to you real soon.
