“Yesterday we could see, today we can’t, tomorrow we shall see again…”

“Yesterday we could see, today we can’t, tomorrow we shall see again…” is an epigraph marking the transition into Part 2, “Reckoning.” Attributed to José Saramago’s Blindness, the sentence gives the book a compact image for the crisis of knowing: what seemed visible can become obscure, and the possibility of seeing again remains open rather than assured.

Placement and Attribution

The line appears after the first part and immediately before Chapter 8. Its source is identified as José Saramago’s Blindness, and its placement makes it a threshold rather than dialogue within a scene. The book turns from its account of events at Memorial Medical Center toward the later reckoning with what happened there and elsewhere during the disaster.

Seeing and Not Seeing

The epigraph’s repeated contrast between seeing and not seeing resonates with the surrounding account of decisions made under extreme conditions. Earlier, Jannie Burgess’s history exposes a long contradiction in New Orleans medicine: she spent thirty-five years nursing in hospitals and nursing homes, yet because of racial segregation could not receive care at many private hospitals, including Memorial until decades after it opened. During the evacuation, a different classification had immediate consequences: Memorial’s doctors had decided that patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders would be evacuated last, although such an order meant not to revive a patient after breathing or heartbeat stopped, not to deny rescue. The phrase’s movement from sight to blindness thus sits beside both historical exclusion and a crisis in which medical categories could be misunderstood and applied beyond their intended meaning.

A Threshold to the Reckoning

The next chapter begins with a live television camera showing thousands of people trapped on the Interstate 10 cloverleaf; the reporter estimates that 90 percent came from inner-city housing projects before introducing two frightened Memorial employees. The sequence widens the book’s focus from the hospital to the city’s unequal exposure and the public account of the emergency. Later, the narrative contrasts the deaths and disputed care at several hospitals with the response at Charity Hospital, where staff continued caring for patients amid flooding, power loss, and a delayed evacuation. In that structure, “tomorrow we shall see again” functions not as a claim that the crisis will be neatly resolved, but as an opening onto the investigation, comparison, and moral uncertainty that the reckoning requires.