The Memory Of Empires

Yesterday while in the car on the way to the seaside, my son remarked that all Portuguese songs are sad. While this is a gross generalization, it is true that most, and perhaps the best, Portuguese songs partake a note of wishfulness or sadness.

You can find the same note vibrating through the poetry and novels, even those that are ostensibly cheerful. This is how, in the same way, it took until well into the late eighties for Americans to master the “nevermind” novel Europeans specialize in. Unlike their European counterparts, Americans always feel as though there is a solution to everything.

It is that feeling that impels our “can do” spirit. P.J. O’Rourke in describing the dismal conditions in a restaurant in the newly fallen Soviet Union/new Russia said that an American with a couple of rags and a bottle of windex would set it all to rights.

It is not imperial aspirations, despite what a lot of our intellectuals think, that lead us to do this, but the rock-bottom belief that every problem has a solution and that the solution can’t be much farther to seek than the next average Joe with a will and a plan. (The endless wait for “experts” is part of the European disease, but more on that later.)

While visiting here, I have to repress a thousand times a day the wish to set something straight that is crooked, clean something that is dirty, straighten something that is fallen. But there is not much point. It would be perceived as, if not “imperial” at least as intrusive. And I’m only here for two weeks and would much prefer not to make enemies. So I endure it, as do those who are submerged in the population and who wish the could straighten and clean and fix. I’m sure that the mix is about the same there and there, of those who prefer to let things be, and those who would improve them. The difference is one of, for lack of a better term, the national soul.

If nations have souls, America is the young man setting out into the world. It has had some smacks on the nose and a couple of pratfalls, but it’s still hopeful and knows the future is bright ahead. On the other hand Portugal….

Portugal as I told my son, has been part of three lost empires – real empires, not the imagined American Empire: Carthage, Rome and their own empire, all of them have vanished. And now Portugal is like the old person sitting in the corner, reminiscing on bygone glories.

Perhaps this is appropriate for a country where demographics has tilted and where in 25 years they expect the population to be halved. (Mind you for a country of old people, they all drive like bats out of hell… OTOH, so do the old people in my neighborhood.)

The problem, perhaps compounded by a melancholy walk around the area, pointing out to my son the remains (mostly ruins) of the village I knew, is that I’m having issues writing space opera. Space Opera is a quintissential American genre. I’ve read French and Portuguese space operas and they fail to convince at the gut level. Here, surrounded by the remains of past grandeur, I find myself wanting to write the sort of epic fantasy that starts with “Let me tell you of the lost city on the edge of the congealed sea….”