Jose Saramago, Portuguese novelist and 1998 Nobel Prize winner for literature, gave a most wonderful speech, of which, I quote in part here. Having spoken of his grandparents, Portuguese peasant villagers, and of characters in his early novels, he went on to say: "It was with such men and women risen from the ground, real people first, figures of fiction later, that I learned how to be patient, to trust and to confide in time, that same time that simultaneously builds and des