Seriously, who wouldn't like steak with coffee sauce? Especially when it has an egg on top? I'll tell you who couldn't resist it: Fernando Pessoa. The Brasileria, one of Pessoa's haunts, was a very lovely place to sit and write or simply watch the world go by.
OK, so I know I post too many pictures of the cabin, but, seriously, sometimes I'm just amazed that I live here. It's not perfect, certainly, and sometimes maddening (as I prepare to load all the trash into my car and head off to the dump), but it's a sweet life. Whenever Janet and I talk about moving to Portugal we also come back to the fact that it would be very hard to leave here.
I mentioned that when hadn't been in Evora very long before Janet began looking for property online. It's definitely a beautiful town - as I described, oddly both medieval and also hip - but I think what pushed JP over the edge was our walk through the Chapel of Bones. You would think that a room constructed out of human bones would be creepy - and I think Janet thought it would be before she walked in - but it actually ends up feeling exactly the opposite way. I suppose that it should feel like the Catacombs in Paris, but it doesn't at all, which may be because it's above ground and airy - and because it's attached to a beautiful cathedral - or maybe because the bones were volunteered and not simply moved out of perceived necessity. No matter the answer, visiting it actually felt completely life-affirming. And apparently we'll be visiting it a lot when we live in Evora.
A couple days ago I was talking about our visit to Madrid and the corresponding museum orgy. It was so lovely to get back to see them again, and I was reminded what a great museum the Thyssen is. While roaming around their modern art section I stumbled across a Tracey Emin neon light sculpture. I've made extensive use of her art, especially her neon light sculptures, over the years in various classes so it was more than a bit exciting see one in person.
To see all the things that happen to us as accidents or incidents from a novel, which we read not with our eyes but with life. Only with this attitude can we overcome the mischief of each day and the fickleness of events.
Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet, ch. 246
One of my favorite bar questions has always been: what filmmaker would you choose to direct your life story - or which author would write your life story? I suppose I wouldn't choose Pessoa because he'd never actually finish the job - and then they'd find all his Scudder-related pages in a big trunk decades later, and the papers would be in not logical order and others would have the power to organize them as they see fit. Of course, actually, that might be the best fit, all thins considered. Doubtless they would do a better job making sense of my life than I have. Now, the bigger question, at least as related to this passage, is how one should approach life. As Epictetus tells us, it's not the events that happen to you that matter, but instead your response to them.
One of the peculiarities of this past summer's trip to Portugal is the number of folks who thought we were a charming old married couple who had somehow kept the fires burning even after all these decades. I guess "all these decades" part of the equation makes sense. Maybe it would have made more sense if they knew that we'd only been married a year (and, in fact, celebrated our first anniversary on the trip). Yesterday we had dinner at Sarducci's and the waitress asked if we were on a date. I told her it was even worse: we're married.
To organize our life in such a way that it becomes a mystery to others, that those who are closest to us will only be closer to not knowing us. That is how I've shaped by life, almost without thinking about it, but I did it with so much instinctive art that even to myself I've become a not entirely clear and definitive individual.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 115
I used to joke that I could, almost innately, understand why everybody did everything, with one obvious and alarming exception: me. I don't know if that's changed much, and maybe I don't know why I've remained a mystery to myself because I've spent so much time and effort remaining a mystery to everyone else. Maybe I thought that it made me seem more interesting, more aloof and mysterious, or maybe I just found others far more interesting than myself, and thus investigating them always took precedent over exploring myself.
