“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.)
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“It was the language of the house itself that spoke to him, writing out for him with surpassing breadth and freedom the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities of the mistress. Never, he felt sure, had he seen so many things so unanimously ugly – operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have found this last name for the whole character; ‘cruel’ somehow played into the subject for an article – an article that his impression put straight into his mind. He would write about the heavy horrors that could still flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of its short way with false gods; and it would be funny if what he should have got from Mrs. Lowder were to prove after all but a small amount of copy. Yet the great thing, really the dark thing, was that, even while he thought of the quick column he might add up, he felt it less easy to laugh at the heavy horrors than to quail before them. He couldn’t describe and dismiss them collectively, call them either Mid-Victorian or Early – not being certain they were rangeable under one rubric. It was only manifest they were splendid and were furthermore conclusively British. They constituted an order and abounded in rare material – precious woods, metals, stuffs, stones. He had never dreamed of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and corded, drawn everywhere so tight and curled everywhere so thick. He had never dreamed of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush, so much rosewood and marble and malachite. But it was above all the solid forms, the wasted finish, the misguided cost, the general attestation of morality and money, a good conscience and a big balance. These things finally represented for him a portentous negation of his own world of thought – of which, for that matter, in presence of them, he became as for the first time hopelessly aware. They revealed it to him by their merciless difference.”
(Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, book 2, chapter 2)
Having transferred the one to the other
And living on the plain of insistent self-knowledge
Just outside the great city, I see many
Who come and go, and being myself involved in distant places
Ask how they adjust to
The light that rains on the traveler’s back
And pushes out before him. It is always “the journey,”
And we are never sure if these are preparations
Or a welcome back to the old circle of stone posts.
That was there before the first invention
And now seems a place of vines and muted shimmers
And sighing at noon
As opposed to
The terrain of stars, the robe
Of only that journey. You adjusted to all that
Over a long period of years. When we next set out
I had spent years in your company
And was now turning back, half amused, half afraid,
Having in any case left something important back home
Which I could not continue without,
An invention so simple I could never figure out
How they spent so many ages without discovering it.
I would have found it, altered it
To be my shape, probably in my own lifetime,
In a decade, in just a few years.
(John Ashbery, from As We Know.)