sight

Last night I finished reading Jose Saramago's Seeing, the sequel to Blindness. While I loved the latter,  Seeing left me feeling like I'd been punched in the gut, then kicked in the face. Even so, there's this:

He walked through the garden and stopped for a moment to study the statue of the woman with the empty jar, They left me here, she seemed to be saying, and now all I'm good for is staring into this grubby water, there was a time when the stone I'm made from was white, when a fountain flowed day and night from this jar, they never told me where all the water came from, I was just here to tip up the jar, but now not a drop falls from it, and no one has come to tell me why it stopped.