Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago refuses the neat myth that September 11 was Year Zero. That’s the first provocation: he strips the event of its monopoly on meaning, pushing it back into a longer, messier historical current. Coming from a novelist steeped in allegory and political dissent, the move reads less like contrarianism than like a warning against narrative laziness. Catastrophes don’t create history; they crystallize what’s been metabolizing for decades.

“The world had already changed” is also an indictment of the West’s sudden discovery of vulnerability, as if instability only counts once it arrives on televised American soil. His “20 or 30 years” points to late-20th-century accelerants: neoliberal globalization, collapsing ideologies after the Cold War, the migration and identity pressures of postcolonial reality, and a media ecosystem that turns geopolitics into a looped spectacle. In that light, 9/11 becomes not a rupture from nowhere but a flare that exposes the architecture underneath.

Then he goes bigger: “A civilization ends, another one begins.” It’s deliberately biblical, almost too grand, and that’s the trick. Saramago is baiting our appetite for epochal storytelling while undercutting the comforting version of it. Civilizations don’t switch off; they erode, mutate, and get renamed after the fact. The line carries dread and skepticism at once: dread that the moral vocabulary of the previous era can’t survive what’s coming, skepticism toward leaders who will exploit the “new world” framing to justify permanent emergency, surveillance, and war. The subtext is clear: the real turning point is not the attack itself, but what societies choose to become in response.