Der Zauberberg - Day 8

This is my 8th day on the Zauberberg, with its rituals of temperature measuring several times a day. I've been miraculously healthy, even my eternal catarrh disappeared, temperature between 36,6 and 36,8. I'm also loosing weight, quite naturally, on a miraculous diet of oranges, grilled chicken and fear.
I use my time to revise my past, my memories, my life as a Lusitanist. I never had a very high opinion of Portuguese literature, its intellectual depth, its power of saving the world. Nonetheless, there is one item that should catch my attention. Saramago, the writer I've studied so thoroughly. His diptych of Ensaio sobre a cegueira and Ensaio sobre a lucidez. He was already a Nobel Prize winner when he wrote these books, but if otherwise, it would be a proof of his genius. The sequence of plague and its political consequences; it seemed so abstract at the time, just a fictional story; I did not even delve very deep in these two books in my Saramaguian readings. Yet I took them seriously, learned something from them, internalised them to such a degree that they became one with my animal instincts. And now, I do not doubt this plague will be over, we will drink crystal clear water again. 28 days, I keep saying, even if it dawns on me it might be up to two years. But what about the second part of the diptych, especially in countries like mine? 50 years is my prediction. That means, I couldn't reasonably hope to live long enough to see it over. 
This is why I'm glad to be here, and slowly break my mind to come back to the Netherlands when the time is over, to rebuild everything from nought. I'm not sure if I still manage to find a job as a university professor in the future, perhaps I will do some menial work as I never did in my life. There will be less of those research projects I was counting on. But one day, I shall be an intellectual again. Leiden, Oxford, these places survived many plagues. Except one. There is one plague that never came to them. The one in the second part of the diptych, the one of the dog howling over silence of men.