Posts Tagged ‘saramago’

Art is essentially communication.

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

 

“We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas and, despite the false air of confidence which we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even sometimes, to find each other.

Why it is that while communication technologies continue to develop in a genuinely geometric progression, from improvement to improvement, the other form of communication, proper, real communication, from me to you, from us to them, should still be this confusion crisscrossed with cul-de-sacs, so deceiving with its illusory esplanades, and as devious in expression as in concealment.”

José Saramago, The Double

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