In Blindness, a famous novel by Portuguese writer José Saramago, a man waiting in his car at a traffic light suddenly becomes blind.
Later, inexplicably, the same happens to other inhabitants in the city. Soon public life gets completely disrupted. Law and order, healthcare, food supply - everything sinks into chaos and lawlessness.
No one in the city, Saramago wrote in this dark tale about the degeneration of civilisation, "knew from now on when the light turned red".
On ...
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Caroline de Gruyter is a Europe correspondent and columnist for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. This article has been adapted from one of her columns for NRC.