Portuguese novelist José Saramago died last Friday on the Spanish island of Lanzarote. He was 87. Saramago is known for his poignant parables on humanity and politics. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, his works have since been translated into more than twenty-five languages. A vocal leftist, Saramago worked for years at various odd jobs before losing his job as a newspaper reporter after the downfall of Portugal’s incipient Communist revolution in 1975. He decided then to become a novelist. His strange, beautiful writing is perhaps best memorialized by these haunting words from his perhaps most famous novel, Blindness: ‘Why did 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 go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”

Saramago strived his whole life to help the rest of us to see.