#7 (Or how our life fits all in boxes)

It’s been a while since the last time that I wrote here. Sooner or later I think that for people that don’t have that strong habit of writing every days, there’s always spaces of more laziness, and despite my inner voice telling me to write more, most of the times I just ignore her. For example these last days she has been saying to write a lot of things: about feelings that I have at work, about strange Portuguese words that appear in my days and that I don’t understand its total meaning, about the will of change and about the fear of getting lost. I’ve been reading more in these two last months, reading in a way that I didn’t read for a long time, like getting home, eat something and literally go to the couch hear music and read. I spent years without doing this… I used to read on the trains, on the bus, on some weekend that I was going to the countryside, on the waiting room if I was waiting for being attended in some place, on the library if I had to do something to handle to some teacher. And it was good to rediscover this way of reading. To not have the TV on most of the days of the week… The good thing with this it’s that for moment we can stop reading, look ahead and think in something that the words suggested us. Even with a good new on TV nobody just “pause” the moment to stay thinking in what it might suggest, in the next minute we’re already being drove to other issue that took the previous one from our mind.

Regarding my list and its updates in these last times:

The great great change is that #7 is going to happen more soon that I was thinking. In fact, it has already a marked hour: May 22nd, at 10 in the morning. I’m not literally moving in that minute to a new house, but from that hour I will have a new one. It’s little, it’s not at the edge of the sea, it’s an apartment and I will be surrounded by neighbours. The good thing it’s that represents a big change in my life, a big change that brings bigger doubts and questions. Interior questions mainly, questions that I’m curious in knowing how I’m going to deal with them.
The first immediately thing that #7 brings is that I’m already putting all my life into boxes, and that is a curious thing. What do we want to take? What do we want to leave? What do we want to forget? I’m one of those persons that has hundreds of things that doesn’t worth anything, useless things, little things, tickets of journeys, of concerts, of movies that I really liked, thousands of papers that I don’t really need but that I always kept, and this is the moment where we say “Ok, this is really going to garbage”. And with that so many things go away. Of course that so many others will stay. The curious exercise of “what-do-I-want-to-keep-or-not-of-my-life”.

I’ve read a lot in these few days: on #90 I already read “La Fiévre”, from Le Clézio, the Literature Nobel Prize of 2008, and on #84 and #85 I have some updates to do. I already heard a good CD of Classical Music, and I already started the “learn another language thing” (to compensate the fact of having stopped reading the book in French… I didn’t pass the 1st chapter yet). On my work I had to phone to Spain and I talked in english with the man I phoned to… He didn’t understand much of English so by the middle of the conversation I was already talking in a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish, a mixture that by the end will not be any of either languages. So I decided to learn Spanish. Not to attend formal classes, I wouldn’t have time do it, but trying to learn by myself. The first step was to buy a book in spanish (I had on the shop books that I would prefer read, but I choose “La casa de los espíritus”, from Isabel Allende; I thought that start with the great poets, like Pablo Neruda, would be harder). Portuguese and Spanish are similar languages so it’s not being hard. I already passed the 1st chapter, and I’m underlining all the strange words. After reading this and maybe one more, I’ll buy a grammar and I will start practise writing. For me this is the more simple and easy way.

So, enough of updates for now… I feel that I wrote a lot today, but specially, I feel that I have so much more to write. To think. To talk. To share.

And that makes us feel good =)

p.s.

(and this is what looks like a coffee in Sintra after the Sunday lunch)

Quiet Sundays

I don’t know why Portugal is a country where the Carnival is so celebrated (especially in that so brazilian way of samba + naked girls + parades) but I do know that this brings a wonderful quietness to places that are not very in the mood for that, like Lisbon or Sintra. Tomorrow I will be able to stay more 10 or 15 minutes in bed because yes, the traffic will be less to the centre of the city, and I’m already thinking in the 101 things that I will do on tuesday, the national holiday given by the state (to everybody goes crazy and act like an idiot). Portuguese simply love the weeks with national holidays in the middle, the perfect excuse to not work, and this week is really a week of working the less possible. I’ve heard that we are the european country that has more holidays in a year (14) and in June we even have a week with 3 holidays in the middle. I admit that I also love holidays and I think that’s because they give us the possibility of doing something different, something more pleasantly and nicely in the middle of a week. The though is really something like “where I will go or what I will be doing on next sunny tuesday?” and just the exercise of thinking in the possibilities it’s good.

About the list… lately I’ve been reading a lot and I’m in that point of, without know very well how, having 3 books on the desk (curiously one in portuguese, other in english and other in french), two or three newspapers that I want to read with more attention, the february magazine of my work, also to read with more attention, two little books related with some school-works and finally a book of probabilities and statistic. Unlike the “writing tasks”, I think that the “reading tasks” will not be hard to achieve… I’ve been thinking in the monologue and dialogue tasks and thanks to a little “help” that came from the cold, I’m also studying the possibility of recording the final result in an audio format. I heard some days ago two “audio plays”, that were broadcasted by BBC and I stood simply delighted with them. It’s incredible the action, the feelings and the laughs, that someone can transmit only with the voice and I really was admired with that. I also know that it’s not easy, but it’s that thing, when you find new pleasures, you want very badly explore them more.

I already listened the Bach’s Cello Suites, but I think that I can’t talk about the “like it or not” yet. It was in an end of a day, at the same time that I was reading something, and in the end I had that feeling of “I don’t know…”, of “I must to hear it again”. Classic music is really so different from the things that I’m used to hear that I think that it wasn’t enough that first contact, that first listen… Does this make sense?
(now that I think on it, I think that it does…there were many albums that I only started to like at about the 3rd or 4th time that I heard them)

it's just my feeling, or everybody looks happier?

the great sky is back to Lisbon
today 18ºC
sky-colour when I got out from work: blueee

the will of getting lost somewhere around

Inside us there is something that has no name and that something is what we are

“I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see”

I think that it’s not public the great affection that I have for the Portuguese writer José Saramago. For my family it’s very much of “she likes reading” and I know that if I asked to my closest relatives, as my mother or my sister, five books that I own, they wouldn’t know how to answer. My cousin would say easily 20 bands that I like and my other cousin knows instantly if I like or not of something to wear, for example, but with books it seems that it’s something completely apart. So, for them, I can have all Saramago books or all the Nicholas Sparks romances that the difference wouldn’t be much. I have some friends that also read, that gave and receive books, that know the latest titles and that, but I think that only two read Saramago and like it. It’s so common to hear that Saramago books are boring and hard to read and so rare hear someone enthusiastically talking about his stories. I can think “well, maybe it’s just people of my age that don’t read much Saramago, or my circle of friends”, and hope that be that, but there’s an image that I have in my mind of him (completely alone in a table in a book fair, in Lisbon) that takes me back to the other feeling.

He creates the most unpredictable situations and simply put humans reacting to them. Saramago stories should be discussed at TV, at radio, at school, everywhere, “and if people stop dying from one day to another?”, “and if suddenly we all stop seeing?”, “what if one woman could truly see a person’s interior?”, “how would we react if we found out someone exactly like us?”. “what can happen when a man changes just one word in a book that is read to be published?”, “if we had the opportunity, would we like to have a 7-days notice before the moment where we die?”, … To read Saramago is a mental exercise. How many times did I read the same sentence? How many times I went back to understand what was there at my front? His stories open new worlds and new possibilities for me, talk to me of humanity, of the very basic instincts, of good, of bad, of people as they are, with no colourful tricks, of things that are beneath.

“Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters.”

A few times ago I spent some days in the Pyrenees and I took a Saramago’s book that it was read a little bit almost every day aloud, and I can’t take out of my mind this image, of getting to a mountain refuge at the end of the day, perfect weather and wonderful places, and be sited on a stone resting and hearing (or reading if it was my time) his story, with my eyes closed. I haven’t read or heard anything aloud since my early school years and it was so good to discover that little pleasure.

Something to read more and more in these 1001 days =)

“The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed. It was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quartenary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as then social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny. Add to this general observation, the particular circumstance that in simple spirits, the remorse caused by committing some evil act often becomes confused with ancestral fears of every kind, and the result will be that the punishment of the prevaricator ends up being, without mercy or pity, twice what he deserved.”

it is written