“Such pretty details as this [Nathaniel] Wraxall missed; also details less pretty, such as two men whom [Richard] Twiss observed when ‘strolling one day about Lisbon in search of new objects’, who had each a large baboon on his shoulders, freeing his head from vermin; it seems they were hired out for this purpose. ‘They seem’, says Twiss, ‘to be the lousiest people I know of, especially the women, who have an enormous quantity of hair.’ ”
(Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal Too, pp. 176–7.)
“Another, Jerome Allen, a century and a half later, an intimate of the Portuguese nobility and himself half Portuguese, became pen-maker to the court and a favourite of the king and queen, brilliantly conducted theological disputations before the court, and designed a balloon which (unlike some Portuguese balloons) really went up: it had for passenger an immense baboon in a sailor suit. The baboon, not liking the trip, jumped into the Tagus and was drowned, but, as he was a baboon of malevolent disposition, no one minded, and the episode added prestige to the college.”
(Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal Too, pp. 85–86.)
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“After Lisbon and Oporto, there are only two considerable towns in Portugal, Coimbra and Évora, and Évora, the smaller of the two, is the more interesting.*
* I find that Braga has a slightly larger population than Coimbra, but leave the remark unchallenged in order not to spoil my argument.”
(Sacheverell Sitwell, Portugal and Madeira, p. 142.)
“Setúbal wafts fish oil into the blue skies and, concurrently, should echo to the banging of sardine tins, except that the canning is carried out discreetly behind closed factory doors. It is a dusty town, and can be blinding in the heat and glare.”
(Sacheverell Sitwell, Portugal and Madeira, p. 137.)
“Sergio envied the few resolute anti-Fascists he knew, Communists and the like, because their attitude was as clear as that of the Fascists. But he was not able to distill his doubts and disgust into an unambiguous attitude, a plan of action. Even though he hated Fascism, he felt that it had wormed its way into his blood, not in the form of political allegiance, but rather as a kind of torpor and mortal passivity, like a poison that slowly intoxicates and weakens the body.”
(Alberto Moravia, The Two Friends, trans. Marina Harss, version A, p. 11.)
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“There are problems in this for the modern reader. Few of us share the extent and depth of Camões’s knowledge or the classics, and the pleasures of recognition, that agreeable Renaissance game of spotting how the poet has adapted a favourite passage from a classical author and refurbished it to serve a contemporary purpose, plays little part in our reading.”
(Landeg White, introduction to Luis Vaz de Camões’s The Lusíads, p. xiii.)
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“As for myself, O Lord, if I am to tell you all that you have given me to understand about this formless matter, and if I am to set it down in this book, I must confess that when I first heard it mentioned, I did not understand what it meant, nor did those who told me of it. I used to picture it to myself in countless different forms, which means that I did not really picture it at all, because my mind simply conjured up hideous and horrible shapes. They were perversions of the natural order, but shapes nevertheless. I took ‘formless’ to mean, not something entirely without form, but some shape so monstrous and grotesque that if I were to see it, my senses would recoil and my human frailty quail before it. But what I imagined was not truly formless, that is, it was not something bereft of form of any sort. It was formless only by comparison with other more graceful forms. Yet reason told me that if I wished to conceive of something that was formless in the true sense of the world, I should have to picture something deprived of any trace of form whatsoever, and this I was unable to do. For I could sooner believe that what had no form at all simply did not exist than imagine matter in an intermediate stage between form and non-existence, some formless thing that was next to being nothing at all.”
(St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, book XII, chapter 6, p. 283.)