José Saramago
[Writer, b. 1922, Azinhaga, Portugal, d. 2010, Tias, Las Palmas, Spain.]

 old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it’s not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him—or herself in us, ‘Who’s that looking at me so sadly,’ he or she would say. 
 We are finally living in Plato’s cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave—who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall—were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we’re now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don’t even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.