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.
*crossposted at Classical Values*
According To Hoyt 
That makes for interesting comparison with my country here at the other end of Europe: we were always a poor backwater. Our damn national anthem has lines which translate as ‘our country is poor and so will stay’ (it gets a bit more optimistic towards the end, and usually only the first and last lines are sung so you rarely hear that bit. But it is there.).
There were independent farmers here, the Swedes built a few castles, and there was a lot of forest. People could hunt and fish and sell those products or farm and mostly just barely survive. No Vikings trips in our history, unless you count being in the receiving end (although we did make a few of their early groups to leave, with a tail between their legs – unfortunately Finns did not manage to unite but stayed in small, mutually hostile groups until the Swedes did start coming on long and hard enough to conquer). No kingdoms (maybe, there are a few tantalizing hints in some old poems, from around the times the Roman empire was crumbling, and earlier, but no way to verify anything, so the official history will stay as ‘small villages, small farms, small local chiefs’. And anyway, even if there were some early attempts towards something like kingdoms here, they didn’t last).
Our history is as long as Portugal’s. But we don’t have much of it left. Wooden buildings, small farms, small cities. Towns burned, farms disappeared. There is nothing much to see, we might as well have no history beyond the last few hundred years. Turku, where I live, used to burn more or less completely down about once a century, the last big fire was about two centuries ago.
Our men fought for Sweden, then for a century we belonged to the Russians, and got our independence a bit by accident while the Russians were mostly busy with their revolution.
We have become a rich Western nation during about the last 60 years. A part may have been the Lutheran work morals – which seem to be perhaps getting a bit lost with our latest generations. Some part may have been, who knows, feeling good about our last wars – we didn’t win, but, by God, we did not get conquered by the Soviet Union, and that does count for something. Maybe that was what gave us enough energy to build our country from poor and backward into something thriving.
And maybe the fact that we have no baggage does count too. Everything we do now is new, a chance for the descendants of uneducated, poor peasants to show that we are no worse than anybody else.
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Well, I do live in Time as a 4th dimension – when I see my daughter I see her as the sum of all years, not merely the present moment. So I s’pose that being aware of the history of a nation (area) could have the effects described.
OTOH, given what is taught as History in the schools these days (even more importantly, what is learned as History in those schools) I think we have little cause for fear of the big H becoming a ball’n’chain on American ankles.
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