1 From Blindness to Seeing with José Saramago "Western societies, became increasingly blind; because instead of tackling the big problems, we preferred to see less." (José Saramago) Our twenty-second interview is with Burghard Baltrusch, literary scholar (Vigo, Spain) by Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte (Basel, Switzerland) Wednesday, January 20, 2021. PICT Voices is an interview series conducted by PICT faculty with notable members of the broader PICT community. Our goal is to present our community with a variety of voices across the spectrum of the humanities and critical, creative thinking. To achieve this, we will interview a broad spectrum of thinkers ranging from scholars to journalists. website: parisinstitute.org/ soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/parisinstitute instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parisinstitute facebook: https://www.facebook.com/parisinstitute The full interview can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv3c_CPdLc K: This year we were able to assist a strange phenomenon, because of the covid 19 pandemic. There were a couple of older books that returned prominently on the best- seller lists. There was Daniel Defoe’s book on the plague in London, Camus’ novel The Plague, but most of all there was Saramago’s Blindness, almost an infinity of people rushed to read or re-read this book in this troubled year. Did you? But more importantly, why do you think this was the case, and do you think it was a good choice by those who did? B: Thank you very much, Kristof, for inviting me to do this podcast and congratulations for the excellent job you are doing at The Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. And yes, last year I immediately came back to Blindness. I also made my students in Vigo read and discuss it, and I gave a virtual open class lecture on it to other students in Bogotá/Colombia.