Jose Saramago's last stand: 'Cain' (2009) a novel

 "That you didn't put it there yourself, and that nothing you have told me is true, Perhaps my truth is your lie, Perhaps, but doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time, that's why you couldn't persuade me to accept as truths what seemed to me more like falsehoods."

(JS - pg36)

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it's not so much a question of them having or not having the ideas and the necessary vocabulary to express those ideas, but of our own capacity to accept, even if only out of simple human empathy and intellectual generosity, that a peasant from the very earliest times and an old man leading two sheep along a piece of rope, with only a limited knowledge and a language that is still only taking its first tentative steps, were driven by the need to try out ways of expressing premonitions and inuitions apparently beyond their reach.

 

Obviously, they didn't say those actual words, but the doubts, suspicions, perplexities, argumentative advances and retreats were nevertheless there.  All we did was put it into a modern idiom the twofold and, for us, insoluble mystery of language and thought of the time.  If the result is coherent now, it would have been then, given that we're all of us muleteers travelin down the same road.  All of us, both the learned and the ignorant. (JS - pg37)

 

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They'll get there though, progress, as it will come to be known later on, is inevitable, as inevitable as death. And as life. 

 

but his destiny is waiting for him here, however bitter it may turn out to be, but that's something you only know when it's too late to change and you have no option but to confront it.

 

idle individuals who, throughout the ages, have enjoyed watching other people work, but they were quick to realize that he was simply another victim of the crisis

 

habitual words, the sort you use every day, end up having conseuqnece no one would have dared predict, they weren't born for that and yet they shook the world.

 

(JS - pg38-42)

 

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never feel flattered being entrusted with a delicate mission

 

(JS - pg46)

 

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Yes, that is the usual formula used to explain what appears to have happened here, the future, we say, and we breath more easily, now that we have placed a label on it, a docket, but in our opinion, it would be clearer to call it another present, because the land is the same, but has various presents, some are past presents, others are future presents, and that, surely, is simple enough for anyone to understand.

 

(JS -pg67)