1) The document discusses the biblical story of Noah and the Great Flood, in which God destroys corrupt humanity and spares Noah and his family. 2) It then discusses themes from the novel Blindness such as the loss of identity and humanity without sight, the disorientation of living in a "groping city" without vision, and new forms of community emerging among the blind. 3) Key characters debate what it means to be human without sight and whether blindness is a temporary condition or a new way of being.

1. Lecture 14: The Beginning Is the End Is the
Beginning
English 165EW
Winter 2013
27 February 2013
“And you are right. There will be pain for us all, but it will
not be all pain, nor will this pain be the last. We […] will
have to pass through the bitter water before we reach
the sweet.”
— Abraham Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

2. The Great Flood
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and
the earth was filled with violence.
12 So God looked upon the earth, and indeed it
was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their
way on the earth.
13 And God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh
has come before Me, for the earth is filled
with violence through them, and behold, I will
destroy them with the earth.”
(Genesis 6)

3. 17 Now the flood was on the earth forty days. The waters
increased and lifted up the ark, and it rose high above
the earth.
18 The waters prevailed and greatly increased on the
earth, and the ark moved about on the surface of the
waters.
19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth, and
all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered.
20 The waters prevailed fifteen cubits upward, and the
mountains were covered.
[…]
23 So He destroyed all living things which were on the face
of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and
bird of the air. They were destroyed from the earth.
(Genesis 7)

4. 8 Then God spoke to Noah and to his sons with him,
saying:
9 “And as for Me, behold, I establish My covenant with
you and with your descendants after you,
10 “and with every living creature that is with you: the
birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you,
of all that go out of the ark, every beast of the earth.
11 “Thus I establish My covenant with you: Never again
shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood;
never again shall there be a flood to destroy the
earth.”
12 And God said: “This is the sign of the covenant which I
make between Me and you, and every living creature
that is with you, for perpetual generations:
13 “I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the
sign of the covenant between Me and the earth.
(Genesis 9)

5. The purifying ritual
“there was such an abundance of water, all of
it purifying.” (307; ch. 16)
“she searched in the kitchen for soap and
detergents, scrubbing brushes, anything that
might be used to clean a little, at least a little,
of this unbearable filth of the soul. Of the body,
she said, as if to correct the metaphysical
thought, then she added, It’s all the same.”
(279; ch. 15)

6. “He made lather so that the cleaning process
should be extended […] he was a man of
foam, white in the middle of an immense white
blindness where nobody could find him.” (284;
ch. 15)
“If only the rain would last, in this situation
sunshine would be the worst that could
happen to us, said the doctor’s wife.” (286; ch.
15)
“But you wrote books and those books carry
your name, said the doctor’s wife, Now
nobody can read them, it is as if they did not
exist.” (290; ch. 15)

7. To complete a sorites …
The girl with the dark glasses: “in my opinion
we’re already dead, we’re blind because we’re
dead, or if you would prefer me to put it another
way, we’re dead because we’re blind, it comes to
the same thing.” (251; ch. 14)
The writer: “Blind people do not need a name, I
am my voice, nothing else matters.” (290; ch. 15)
The doctor: “the human body is also an
organised system, it lives as long as it keeps
organised, and death is only the effect of a
disorganisation.” (296; ch. 16)

8. “We are already half dead, said the doctor, We
are still half alive too, answered his wife.”
(303; ch. 16)
“And then the doctor’s wife said, What times
we live in, we find the order of things inverted,
a symbol that nearly always signified death
has become a sign of life, There are hands
capable of these and greater wonders, said
the doctor.” (304; ch. 16)

9. Blindspace
“we are in an old building and badly designed at that, […]
doorways so narrow that they look more like bottlenecks,
corridors as crazy as the other inmates of the asylum,
opening for no clear reason and closing who knows
where, and no one is ever likely to find out.” (144; ch. 9)
“We may observe in the flesh how badly planned and
organized these human communities in orphanages,
hospitals and mental asylums have been, note how each
bed, in itself, with his framework of pointed metal bars,
can be transformed into a lethal trap, look at the terrible
consequences of of having only one door to wards
occupied by forty people, not counting those asleep on
the floor, if the fire gets there first and blocks their exit, no
one will escape.” (213, ch. 12)

10. “The Groping City”*
“the fact is that there is no comparison between
living in a rational labyrinth, which is, by definition,
a mental asylum and venturing forth, without a
guiding hand or a dog-leash, into the demented
labyrinth of the city, where memory will serve no
purpose, for it will merely be able to recall the
images of places but not the paths whereby we
might get there.” (217; ch. 13)
the doctor’s wife: “There’s no difference between
inside and outside, between here and there,
between the many and the few, between what
we’re living through and what we shall have to live
through.” (242; ch. 14) * Wyndham, ch. 3

11. “new ways of living are being invented”*
“everyone is blind, the whole city, the entire
country […] it was not the same as before, when
blind people could always count on the
assistance of some passerby, whether to cross
the street, or to get back on to the right path in
the case of having inadvertently strayed from the
usual route.” (222; ch. 13)
the doctor’s wife: “life exists, because your four
senses say so.” (242; ch. 14)
“the whole banking system collapsed, blown
over like a house of cards” (267; ch. 14)
* the doctor, 256 (ch. 14)

12. The doctor’s wife and the girl with dark glasses: “the
feelings with which we have lived and which allowed us
to live as we were, depended on our having the eyes
we were born with. […] Before, when we could still see,
there were also blind people, Few in comparison, the
feelings we use were those of someone who could see,
therefore blind people felt with the feelings of others,
not as the blind people they were, now, certainly, what
is emerging are the real feelings of the blind.” (252; ch.
14)
The doctor’s wife: “You are a writer, you have, as you
said a moment ago, an obligation to know words,
therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us,
if a person kills another, for example, it would be better
to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the
horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no
need for us to say it was horrible.” (292; ch. 15)

13. New forms of identity
“Were we not trying to reduce her [the girl with the dark
glasses] to some primary definition, we should finally say
of her, in the broad sense, that she lives as she pleases
and moreover gets all the pleasure she can from life.”
(23; ch. 2)
The doctor’s wife: “should I turn blind, if after turning
blind I should no longer be the person I was, how would I
then be able to go on loving him, and with what love”?
(252; ch. 14)
The doctor’s wife: “Perhaps humanity will manage to live
without eyes, but then it will cease to be humanity, the
result is obvious, which of us think of ourselves as being
as human as we believed ourselves to be before”? (255)

14. The doctor’s wife: “now we are all equal
regarding good and evil, please, don’t ask me
what good and what evil are, we knew what it
was each time we had to act when blindness
was an exception, what is right and what is
wrong are simply different ways of
understanding our relationships with the
others […] forgive this moralising speech, you
do not know, you cannot know, what it means
to have eyes in a world in which everyone else
is blind.” (276; ch. 15)
The girl with the dark glasses: “inside us there
is something that has no name, that
something is what we are.” (276)

15. “I have no explanation, there may
not be one”*
“She looked at them, her eyes filled with tears, there
they were, as dependent on her as little children on
their mother. If I should let them down—she thought.
It did not occur to her that all around her the people
were blind yet managed to live.” (225; ch. 13)
The old man with the eye patch: “let’s be glad of our
good fortune at still having a pair of seeing eyes with
us here, the last pair left, if they are extinguished one
day, I don’t even want to think about it, then the
thread which links us to that human mankind would
be broken.” (305; ch. 15)
* the doctor’s wife, 293 (ch. 16)

16. “for the first time since the onset of blindness,
it was the doctor who guided his wife.” (313;
ch. 17)
“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.” (326; ch. 17)
“It is my turn, she thought. Fear made her
quickly lower her eyes. The city was still
there.” (326)