I am, of course, for progress. Progress, understood as what makes human life easier or even more pleasant.
I have some doubts, though, about to what extent the place where I grew up has progressed or just become more unpleasant.
I cannot remember this place – not from growing up here.
Things have changed beyond recognition. It started with the highway that bisected the main road of the village in two, and in that way took out the heart of the village. Then, as the city of Porto grew to engulf it, the village bristled with stack-a-prole apartments. You find them in any country that has succumbed to socialism, particularly in the Eastern European countries – graceless and featureless concrete boxes, stacked one on the other, with perhaps the nominal balcony where the householder can allow his children to catch a gulp of non-recycled air.
Old Portuguese houses, even the very large ones built as apartments, have a certain Mediterranean charm adorned with red tile roofs and often graced with curving balconies or other small notes that lend the whole indescribable charm.
But at a certain point – I remember it – featureless concrete apartment blocks were the future, and that’s where these people wanted to go and where they hurried, after I left to the States. (I don’t want to imply I would have stopped it had I been here, but who knows. It is my considered opinion that not much can stop a determined woman with an opinion. Tanks and bulldozers tremble before a woman with her hands at her waist and an expression of sullen determination.) These apartment blocks are everywhere, facing other apartment blocks, with only the occasional park here and there, with maybe a dozen stunted trees.
I remember growing up in the village and spending time exploring the abandoned Roman gold mines amid the pine forests. Now the pine forests themselves have disappeared and the mines are, presumably, buried under these “developments.” I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like to be a kid in one of these apartment blocks.
They’ll find it natural, I suppose. And probably they have tons of little friends and lead lives quite unlike my lonely childhood. But I suspect they have less freedom and their visual landscape is far empoverished.
The new schools, set amid parks, are graceless brick boxes surrounded by chain link fence, looking more like minimum security prisons than like institutions of learning. Nothing like the old, whitewashed village school with one room for girls and one for boys.
I know you’ll say – or you would if you studied the matter – that nowadays, at least, these children have bathrooms in the home and are generally cleaner and better fed than we were. I realize it is probably stupid of me to feel the aesthetic impoverishment they suffer is worse than being food-deprived or dirty.
I read enough stories of people growing up in NYC in the early twentieth century to know one can learn to love an arid cityscape – even as a small child. But these apartment blocks are not set in the center of strongly linked neighborhoods nor are they even as well built as early twentieth century apartments, and I can’t help but wonder if the sterile surroundings impoverish the mind, the soul and the imagination.
Perhaps I’m just an old woman lamenting the passing of her childhood landscapes. It seems particularly pointless to me, since Portuguese population is not even growing. Instead, the villages and interlands are becoming depopulated while the city burgeons with rootless people.
I’d give quite a bit to walk again the streets of the old village where we knew everyone, but barring time travel that is impossible.
So I take my son down the old trails, and get lost, then find my way again as I trace it by a bit of an abandoned house, the ruined wall of a field where I once played.
You can’t go home again. At best, you can go to what remains of it, and trace it amid the present looking for bits of the past, like a blind man trying to read the faint impressions of print on a page designed for those who can see.
If you go home, you’re liable to find that not only do you not belong there anymore, but it too does not belong to you. Perhaps it never did.
Crossposted at Classical Values
According To Hoyt 