Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 26

What might things be like when we are not looking at them? This question, which seems less absurd to me every day, is one that I asked often as a child, but only asked myself, not my parents or my teachers, because I guessed that they would smile at my naïveté (or at my stupidity, according to a more radical opinion) and would give me the only answer that would never convince me: “When we are not looking at them, things look just the same as when we are looking at them.” I always thought that things, whenever they were alone, were other things. Later, when I had reached that phase of adolescence characterized by the disdainful conceit with which it judges the childhood from which it has emerged, I thought I had found the definitive solution to the metaphysical concern that had tormented my tender years: I thought that if you were to set up a camera in such a way that it would shoot a picture automatically in a room where there were no human presences, you would be able to catch things unawares, and in this way learn their true appearance. I forgot that things are smarter than they seem and don’t allow themselves to be tricked quite so easily: they know perfectly well that inside each camera there is a human eye hidden. . . Besides, even if the equipment had cunningly been able to capture the image of the thing face-on, its other side would have remained beyond the reach of the optical, mechanical, chemical, or digital system of that photographic record. And it would have been toward that hidden side that at the last moment, ironically, the photographed thing would have turned its secret aspect, that twin sister of darkness. When we enter a room that is immersed in absolute darkness and turn on a light, the darkness disappears. So it is not strange that we should ask ourselves, “Where has it gone?” And there can only be one reply: “It didn’t go anywhere; darkness is simply the other side of light, its secret aspect.” It is a pity that nobody told me earlier, when I was a child. Today I would know all about darkness and light, about light and darkness.