As we were landing in Porto, after our travel (mis)adventures, my son leaned out towards the window (I always claim as right of she who gave birth, the right to the window seat) at a landscape covered in terraces, in which sit massive white or cream buildings with red tile roofs, and said “Wow, it’s like someone built a Roman Civilization in a game and brought it to today’s time.”
It is impossible to clearly explain – in a way other people would understand – how densely populated Portugal is. Let’s just say that most buildings are apartments, even in relatively rural areas such as where my parents live, and that possessing a stand alone home is a sign of wealth. Let’s also say that the only time I landed in as dense a location was when landing in NYC, and even there you can see more green around the edges.
I remember, when I was an exchange student, being taken on a bus past miles and miles of forest and half-disbelieving it. Everyone knew America was more advanced than Portugal (advanced meaning of course, more urbanized, more cosmopolitan) so how was this possible?
But it is not the elbow room – or the lack thereof – that beggars the mind. It’s the elbow room in the past. You can’t go half a kilometer without stumbling on something that remains from medieval days – sometimes properly noted, sometimes in ruins and forgotten – you can’t walk down the street without stumbling on a statue commemorating some event or other. The only thing even vaguely approaching this are the older parts of Philadelphia and for in comparison they’re virtually amnesiac.
Portugal is steeped in history, ankle deep in its currents. Echoes of events unimaginably old to the average American reverberate through everyday life. The design of Roman farmhouses (some of them still bearing the lintel piece identifying a legionary ancestor and the Emperor who gave him the land at the end of his term of service) is overlaid in tile in designs brought to the Peninsula by its Arab occupiers. The carving of ropes and anchors around a farmhouse window reminds you of the lost glories of the discoveries.
Someone said in response to my bookstore post that perhaps Anglo-Saxons were more obsessed with history. This is not true so much as most Portuguese don’t view history so much as something to study as as something that IS. It would be like taking a degree in air and breathing, if you get my meaning. The histories I’ve found are either painfully generic or of the involved, detail-obsessed sort “history of the castle of a little village of no importance from nine o’clock in the morning on Thursday the thirteenth of August of 1234 to seven PM on Sunday the 12th of April of 1246.” Also, they tend to ignore the rest of the world in their inward turning, so I had to learn the story of the castle that sits in the center of the village where I grew up from an internet site run by a British couple. (Turns out it was built as a playhouse for the daughter of a local farmer. I knew it was not a “real” castle, but I lacked the story.) And it was a book in the US that revealed to me the history of the mother of Henry The Navigator, that Portuguese queen known around here only as Phillipa of Lancastre.”
I think I got my first notion of the existence of such a thing as history when taking walks with my dad through the fields and forests around here. We’d stumble on inscriptions, demarcation stones, ruins, and many times they identified themselves in Latin, in ancient Greek, or in more recent (but archaic) versions of Portuguese. It had to wait, though, till I saw pictures of this region from above on the net, to figure out that my grandmother’s assertion that the forests had “always” been there was in fact wrong. It is clear those forests grew over abandoned fields, farms and villages, some dating probably to one of the many invasions, some more recent, like the ones left vacant by the black plague or one of the economic contractions the country suffers through with metronome-like regularity.
Portugal is not only incredibly densely populated by American standards, it is, in fact, built on Portugal.
I remember, though I no longer can do this, living as though time were another dimension – locating myself not just by WHERE I am but WHEN I am, and knowing, as far as I could everything that happened in that space in at least the last millennium – feeling all the past generations and their struggles. It was something less than psychic visions and something more than mere knowing what had happened. It felt like an extra dimension in the world, if that makes sense.
I can no longer do it because though America has history and even pre-history, it is not of the same sort, not as densely packed, not unavoidable. The closest I came to it was while walking around Dinosaur Ridge, in Colorado.
The feeling it induces is akin to walking by the ocean and feeling its immensity dwarf you and knowing that it was there before you were and it will be there when you’re long gone. It makes you feel very small and very unimportant, but at the same time it also makes your current problems seem negligible as you pause in the presence of something bigger than you.
Unfortunately for Portugal I think it also acts as a ball and chain of sorts. To know that almost everything has been tried, and what you have is the current mess means most people don’t try.
Not that this is why I left for America. I left because ya’ll seduced me by flashing a bit of Constitution, a lot of personal freedom and the swelling mountains of “can do” spirit.
But sometimes I wonder if America will eventually become like Portugal – bowed under the weight of history, warming itself by the fire of past achievements and dreaming of long gone times.
I don’t think this is now, yet. I think we’re more likely to be suffering growth pangs. I don’t think our senescence will come till I’m long in my grave and one of those whose ghostly achievements (I hope) haunt my yet unborn descendants.
And for that I’m glad.
*cross posted at according to hoyt*
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4 responses to “Growing Up In Time”
I had something akin to that experience, when my daughter and I returned to the US after almost twelve years straight, from one tour of duty in Athens, Greece, followed by six years in Spain, at Zaragoza AB, in the Ebro River valley. I had taken the opportunity to travel and sight-see during those years … and then we came back to an assignment at Hill AFB, Utah, after visiting my parents in San Diego. I was driving up the I-15, and there we were in the middle of the Great Basin. We came over a range of hills, just north of a little town called Beaver – where we had passed a sign saying there was not another gas station for about fifty miles. The highway crossed a long, long valley and climbed another range of hills opposite, and in all of that space there was nothing man-made to be seen but the highway, and a line of electrical power supports. No thing else, just the valley and the high hills around it: no fortified heights, no broken watch-towers, or a crumbling village, no sheepfolds or enclosures made of stacked stone … nothing. Just the land and the sky above it, and the highway. No gas for another fifty miles, and I thought of how my European acquaintances would have absolutely freaked at the emptiness of it all. What a horrible shock it would have been in the 19th century, to get off a boat from Bremen or Bristol, arrive in Galveston or Boston … and then find yourself in the valley of the Platte River, the Great Basin, or in the Llano, where there would be nothing man-built as far as the eye could see, unless you built it yourself. I tell that story when I give book-talks about the Adelsverein Trilogy, since I was able to put something of that sense of shock into writing about the German settlers first coming to Texas. They came from a crowded Europe, from a place which had been built upon, fortified, improved for 2,000 years to a place which was empty.
(It’s a wonder more of them didn’t immediatly curl up under a heavy piece of furniture, but they were a tough lot, especially the ones who went farther than the port they landed at in the Americas.)
Sgt. Mom:
It’s a wonder more of them didn’t immediatly curl up under a heavy piece of furniture, but they were a tough lot, especially the ones who went farther than the port they landed at in the Americas.)
In Willa Cather’s My Antonia, one of the immigrant settlers on the prairie commits suicide, as an indication of the shock and dislocation that many felt on coming to a land so different from Europe.
That is one of my favorite books. Not only did Cather describe the prairie well, she had an ear for dialogue. There were some idiosyncratic phrases in that book that made me say to myself, “I know someone who talked just like that.”
The relative emptiness of the land resulted in a different attitude towards strangers. In a thinly populated land, a stranger is a potential friend. In a Europe dense with people and with history, a stranger is a potential enemy, someone to hold at bay.
And sometimes Europeans came to the New World without very much and settled without very much adjustment shock at all. They were instinctively at home. When I visited the highlands of Scotland, I could see that there was at a squint, a close resemblance to the Appalachians. The Scots and the Scots-Irish got off the boat and went up into the mountains and hardly ever came out of them again. A lot of Northern Mexico and the US desert southwest looks like the Extremadura, in Southern Spain, where many of the first conquistadors came from.
But still – the relative emptiness of the continent would have been a shock for someone from crowded old Europe.
Heck, for a boy who was born and grew up in the Midwest, going to the East Coast of the US was a shock! I was applying for a graduate assistantship at UConn, so I flew from St. Louis to Providence, RI and drove a rental car to Storrs, CT (it was cheaper that way). The entire trip from Providence to Storrs was on a tree-lined road on which the speed limit almost never exceeded 45mph, and which never left “civilization” (meaning there were houses and buildings lining the road the whole way). It made me feel increasingly claustrophobic, and I found myself yearning for some open sky over a broad, empty interstate highway. Suffice it to say, I did not attend graduate school there.