LISBON — fletch.nyc

Lisbon left an impression upon me that supplanted the typical wonder of travel as an experience and left me questioning outright who I was before I came to Europe and who I’d be when I’d return.

Of the many emotions with which we hope to be flooded overseas, Sadness is not on most folks’ list. I can’t think of anyone who actively flies to other parts of the world in search of trying and painful feelings, save for perhaps the annual attendees of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival or people searching for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat (I wonder aloud as to how much crossover these two groups have and what it’d take to meet the middle folk of this proverbial Venn diagram).

And yet if and when I think back on the most important shifts in my life, all of them have initialized out of some degree of pain. I’m no advocate for pain as a chosen fuel, and don’t recommend actively seeking it out...but there sure is something to be said of its efficacy as an accelerant.

I was riding on the curtails of what may well have been the most extraordinary adventure to date -- unplanned skirting across much of Southern Europe with my best friend and not a care in the world. The thrill of aimless exploration in Greece and Spain prior had level-set my understanding of a typical day-in-the-life to an unreasonable tier of joy. After weeks in the two aforementioned countries my friend Danny split off while I went onward to London for a combined work and play trip. What ensued was four terrible days of mold allergies and ominous weather patterns circling above that recalled the Dark Mark of Harry Potter’s Deatheaters beckoning their fellow sinister wizards for a community board meeting of black magic. I’d be doing the UK and any potential visitors a disservice if I made that particular leg out as anything other than damp, grey, and insipid (though it can be “quite lovely” as they say over there).

In no mood to face my feelings and at a loss for sunlight, I pulled up Google Flights and looked at one way ticket prices across the midline of Europe, from Belgrade to Toulousse. Of the many deals and places that struck a chord (which means little for someone who gets excited to join friends in Craigslist item collection missions to Sheepshead Bay), the $110 tag icon hovering over the great city of Lisboa stood out amongst peers. Not because of the cheap day-of pricing tailor-made for an irresponsible traveler, but rather because Portugal has always seemed to be the odd man out amongst the great Romance-language-speaking nations (though really its Romania that gets no love…for those wondering to which countries I am referring, they are Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Romania, each speaking their respective eponymous languages plus countless more dialects and regional variants, all direct descendants of the Vulgar Latin of Ancient Rome). I snatched up the undervalued fare and set course for some quasi-spiritual photosynthesis in the land of the Lisboeta.

There’s something to be said about pre-qualifying a place upon landing. The initial sniff test when you slip out of your destination airport’s sliding doors and huff the duster of a new realms’s air on the curbside. Most people don’t start reeling and roaring until they reach their hotel; I for whatever reason live for the strange minutiae one can glean in a cig-ridden airport arrivals lane. In Lisbon you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve landed at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California: palm trees, beautiful tan people, mellow music, and a highly addictive indolence pervading the gait of every cab driver half-trying to find a customer.

I with great intention chose the taxi driver who smoked inside the cab itself; though not a smoker I can always appreciate an indoor lung dart and the impending route through one of Europe’s oldest cities demanded a languid, cig-supported entrance from the North like that of countless intruding armies before me. Plus, tremendous health implications and a penchant for making you smell like the 405 Freeway aside, nicotine has long outperformed other substances in the social connection potential metric and what better opportunity to shoot the shit with someone than in a country speaking a language with which I have zero familiarity.

On that note, the expectation that the driver’s English would be operational was no American hubris on my part. You may be surprised to learn that Portugal has one of the highest English-speaking rates of any nation in the south of the European Union (not that I would ever, never ever ever be the pasty white guy from suburban Ohio wearing an Ocean Pacific rashguard tucked into khaki shorts with multiple phone holders and Chaco’s with socks who goes on assuming such…and just to clarify, not ironic norm-core L train from Bushwick former runway girl Chaco style worn while en route to a Spring Studios event with a coke baggie on deck, no no, I’m talking about true Americans, the sort who watch more sports than they play and read Barstool and watch Tucker Carlson while texting “their bois”…

…these people expect the rest of the world to speak English…

of them I am not.)

Rant aside, I landed with a non-English speaking man wearing a dated Disney World shirt listening to fado. I spoke in slow Spanish and found enough common ground to hold a whole elementary conversation, one from which I gleaned far more than the average sixty-five comment Slack thread ridden with Dogecoin emojis to which I’m beholden in my otherwise phenomenal day/dream job (day-dream job? An accidental portmanteau win right there if I may say so). The highway from the airport pushed through Brutalist-era apartments onward to older and still older parts of the city. Soon the hills crept up and Lisbon started to unfold itself into view. As we came over the main hill I paused and put my phone away. The pastel apartments rose humbly from every street, with marble and cobblestone lining the narrow passageways below them and many too narrow to accommodate a modern vehicle. An endless sea of bright drying laundry waived at me like a welcoming hand opening the front gates to a new and far off land. Neon signs yelled at me in the language of light to come buy beers, buy hardware, buy canned fish. Take my paper money, I said back in silence (having had many conversations with Light, I knew it rude to reply in the crude noises of Men). “These euros are far too pink to count against my net worth if ever drawn from my Wells Fargo Way2Save Checking Account”, I thought. “Monopoly money with no bounds, step aside Lisbon while I buy this pastry that looks like Kirby from my long lost Gameboy days in the mid-90s”.

We neared the Airbnb I had snagged just 24 hours prior. A light blue building stood in aged grandeur, weathered by the salt in Portugal’s maritime air. I found myself welcomed in by an amiable lady in her forties with some stereotypical Portuguese name I’ve since forgotten. Perfectly tan but not in an offensive, Trumpian way, her leathered hands bore that subtle texture of masculinity that makes an older woman only more attractive. We walked together to the elevator and stood in relative silence save for my repeated obrigados to which she returned a series of sincere smiles.

My Airbnb was nothing short of extraordinary for the price, and in structure was something like an American A-Frame cabin in that it was built under the confines of a sloping roof above, being set at the highest floor in the building. It had two small balconies: one large enough for two to enjoy a cigarette facing backwards into the complex’s vine-covered terrace and another on the front, hardly two feet across and much like the bow of a ship - think Jack and Rose in Titanic but with an encasement of terra cotta and people yelling about soccer down below.

My first days in Lisbon were a mash of wandering around, eating toothsome octopus soup and sitting with my book by the inlet of the Atlantic. I was reading Klara and the Sun, a beautiful story about a robot assistant that helps a sick girl while slowly coming to believe that the Sun is an omniscient and all-loving being (I can certify that it’s a spellbinder as I bought it at the bookstore up the street from me in New York, McNally Jackson, only to leave it in a Heathrow bathroom and decide it worth it to buy yet another copy in London at a small shop in Notting Hill).

I wish to and shall go on and on about the aesthetic wonders of such a preternatural and dreamscaped city as Lisbon in a moment. Let’s start first, however, with what we might call the penultimate chapter of my journey to Portugal. For those familiar with Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, in which he details “the hero’s journey”, let us jump to what he’d call Act II (“Initiation”), Part Nine: Atonement with the Abyss. An attempt to outline a pervasive framework of the major heroes’ journeys of old tales, Campbell explains this stage much better than my limited diction can handle below:

Atonement consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster—the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. One must have faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god's tight scaly ring, and the dreadful ogres dissolve. It is in this ordeal that the hero may derive hope and assurance from the helpful female figure, by whose magic (pollen charms or power of intercession) they are protected through all the frightening experiences of the father's ego-shattering initiation. For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one's faith must be centered elsewhere (Spider Woman, Blessed Mother); and with that reliance for support, one endures the crisis—only to find, in the end, that the father and mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same.

This, all of it and its ugliest twists and turns, awaited me in a small beach town who’s name I’ve forgotten about an hour’s south of Lisbon proper. A friend in Spain had connected me with one of his friends in Lisbon, who in turn invited me to a beach party of Dutch and German acquaintances allegedly dancing the night away at some club on the sand. Not a hard pitch for someone without a single connection in a new country - I hopped in an Uber and sped off into the night. After driving for some time our winding route slowed as we exited the freeway and slithered into a series of unkempt backroads lining unlit, weathered homes. The sparse settlement that could hardly be called a town soon cleared and the road before us carried ahead into an expansive geography of varying shades of black. No lights, no horizon. After some time in the ride share we rolled off the pothole-ridden asphalt and onto a dirt road through the area devoid of light.

A single mass of fluorescence broke the night and grew in size as our car hobbled down the dusty path. The beach club emerged into view and it became immediately apparent that the pitch I’d been sold had been just that and no more. Expectations of a massive dance party were bludgeoned by the frigid breezes coming off the open Atlantic and I found myself awkwardly walking into a venue of no more than twenty five other people who all seemed to know each other. I approached the friend of the friend only to find her quite off in both composure and articulation…she readily admitted that her and her friends were all high on mushrooms.

Though I have not an ounce (or quad or eighth) of prejudice towards psychedelics or recreational drugs at large, I’ve been sober for many years and find these sorts of situations to be not so much frustrating as just boring. Repeating the same cycle of conversation is tough enough in my nascent evening Italian lessons I’ve been taking biweekly on Zoom; trying to interact with a hodgepodge of German, Portuguese and French people all tripping balls in a country to which I’ve never been before appealed considerably less having move on from my own psychedelic phase many moons ago.

I quickly left them and stumbled out onto the beach and was soon swallowed into the black. There, in the total darkness, out of nowhere, I crumbled.

I’m still not sure of the catalyst, but an intense discomfort overcame me and I fell into a chasm of unease and discontentment. I’d been riding high for weeks and a trough in the tide chart that is my heart was inevitable. Still, inevitable feelings don’t seem any less real by virtue of their anticipation.

I don’t write much about negative or vulnerable feelings. I don’t speak to them much either. I seem to do better with taking light jabs at people standing in line at Kith or driving their Scions to NFT events. But candor makes for good stories and this is a story, albeit a meandering one. So I’ll say it:

I was really fucking lonely.

I slumped down into the sand and let the wind accost my face. A tear rolled down from one eye, the other eye retaining its salty puddle, held back by the rim of its lower eyelid like an abandoned infinity pool staring out at inky sea with no one in it to enjoy the view.

I don’t cry much; I get really awkward about it. If I must cry I cry in dim places, so that the crying remains a physical act rather than a component of my appearance that may be caught by a mirror or another person. Here, on the direct opposite side of an endless body of thick, steely water from where I live in New York City,

I gave up.

A small trickle of thought erupted into a monsoon of discomfort and spiraled until I felt sick. A longtime meditator, I sat still and did my best to not run from the anxiety.

It probably took around 20 minutes to warm my mind back up again. I was like a Hot Pocket after awhile in a budget microwave…some parts of me were alive and back on fire after breathing while others remained impervious, cold, artificial… soggy.

In my intermittent return to normalcy my brain did its best to take notes. I often think of meditation as me being inside of my own head but my head is the AMC theater in Kip’s Bay, and I’m a pretentious movie critic who went to NYU Tisch for two semesters that’s sitting in an empty back row judging the show that is my life. I’m eating Junior Mints and struggling to watch the film, fixated on the fact that other people are in the front row also scathing every scene and are perhaps better at the scathing me than even I. Only after awhile do I lockstep with the scenes unfolding, and in that space the patrons clear out and I become one with the film. I leave the theater with my notes in hand, hoping to have scraped even a sentence worth bringing into my life past the popcorn-stained carpet in the lobby on my way to the Baroque bronze doors emptying out into the shit-stained and bubble-gum-crusted 2nd Avenue of my mind.

After this particular “film”, the notes read more legibly than usual. Often I sit for two hours in meditation only to have spent it wondering how Madonna filmed the 2008 Hung Up music video with broken ribs from a horse accident and in her 50’s.

Sometimes I wonder if manatees also find themselves struggling to do their necessary manatee tasks in the face of distracting music loops and brain farts, or if they’re just more in-step than us land-ridden humans will ever be and inherently mindful sirens who float around with the sole goal of redeeming Floridian’s reputations in the world. I think of the poor manatees of Biscayne Bay who are forced to listen to Kid Rock blaring on the boats above, boats with names like “Daddy’s Mistake” and “Reel Therapy”.

So the notes, back to the notes. I said aloud to myself that I was lonely. Not an easy acknowledgement for someone who’s 95% extroverted and thought this blog would be about pretending to be a photographer when he started it. I labelled my co-dependency as an ancillary attribute of this extroversion too. In short, I woke up to the fact that I’d been living my life through interactions (or the lack thereof) with others, and that the worst part about all of this is that there very much exists the option of perpetual avoidance through continued social engagement instead of time spent in silence, in darkness, in the void of the night. As Longfellow once said, ““Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”

Being both cold and sad, I made myself stand and approach the sea. The sea, for me, holds a special significance and one that’s evolved from childhood (not to imply that I am the first human being for whom the sea holds some degree of noteworthy stature).

Growing up I always oriented myself by my relation to the Pacific, it being to the West and in view from any point in my hilly hometown of Laguna. There’s a strange symptom of growing up by the water and one I’ve found confirmed by others whom I’ve met in my fortunate travels around the world: coming up to the edge of the water in any ocean feels, to some degree, like coming home. I felt this on the sands of Southern India despite having never been to the Indian Ocean…I felt it in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean (from where I write this section of the article now)…far back into the sounds of Washington State, and at this part of our story, on the coast of central Portugal along the mighty Atlantic. If there’s water and there’s some salt in it, it’s home.

That meaning to which I referred earlier graduated from familiarity to the outright spiritual. When I became sober many years ago, I was encouraged to believe in something bigger than myself. It can be anything, so long as it’s not you nor another single individual. Some choose God, others Nature, the Sun…one lady I encountered made up an invisible friend named Fred who she kept in close touch with throughout the day. It works if you work it, as they say.

For me, my first iteration of a Higher Power was the sea. I wanted something big, humbling; infinite but palpable. The ocean is a living metaphor for the belief systems I’d later find myself intrigued by, especially among the six orthodox schools of Hinduism, namely Vedanta, Yoga and Shaivism (especially Kashmiri Shaivism). I can’t think of a better allegory to the Atman/Brahman dynamic…the sea is both bigger than you but can be entered…one can entirely submerge oneself in it and feel both separate and a part of it simultaneously, it can churn and rip and roar and in those moments the best path through the waves is that of least resistance, the path of diving deep. And still at other times it can lap and lull us to serenity, it can glisten in ways that no other surface can and it will, just when we least expect it, team up with the Sun and Moon and stars and sky to paint pictures than activate that primal, inborn switch in all of us, no matter how blackened and charred our hearts may be, that switch that flicks on and lets us recognize Beauty in its unadulterated, uncut form.

Lisbon, Portugal. *Fletcher Berryman, 2021. Pentax K1000. Cinestill 800.*

Lisbon, Portugal. *Fletcher Berryman, 2021. Pentax K1000. Kodak Portra 400.*

I walked the wet sand and reached the water. This was a very flat beach, with almost no slope and the thinnest sliver of water reaching far into the land from where the waves first crumble. I tapped my shoe to the water like a five year old in some sort of hardcoded, congenital need to confirm I’d indeed reached the edge of the continent.

In some sober circles there’s a tradition of getting on one’s knees in moments of desperation and saying the famed Serenity Prayer…a practice often taken on in front of a toilet in a bathroom stall to ensure some degree of humility. It’d been awhile since the compulsion to do so had come over me but here, all alone and in what felt like a boundless expanse of space-time, I prayed. I prayed for clarity as to what I should focus my life on upon return to the States, prayed for serenity in the face of uncertainty in having entered a new chapter in life after a long relationship, and finally for my thoughts to be directed towards how I could provision the solution to the former two questions in the lives of others before focusing on my own.

I stepped up, the knees on my pants lightly wetted by the saltwater. Only after prayer did the beauty of the scene, just seconds prior so abysmal, come into my purview.

The awakening to my own loneliness had first yielded a vaccuum in me, but true vacuums it must be remembered cannot exist within the bounds of this universe’s foundational laws (to quote a Science Focus article, “Ultimately, a perfect vacuum isn't possible because quantum theory dictates that energy fluctuations known as 'virtual particles' are constantly popping in and out of existence, even in 'empty' space”). The emptiness drew upon the law of displacement and in rushed wonder, excitement, elation. I looked back out at the sea and again experienced a spiral of thought, but this time it spun upwards. I saw in the sea a reflection of the stars above and was reminded of the cover of one of my favorite instrumental albums, Walking Field by Peals and the songs Floating Leaf and Blue Elvis with which it opens up….the cover here:

My fractal thinking then took me from the cover of the album to the dream that Leo Tolstoy describes as having had in his autobiographical work titled A Confession. If I could combine the Peals cover with the dream Tolstoy describes I’d have the scene in front of me that night in God-knows-where Portugal. It’s an excerpt I’ve read countless times, ultimately implying that it’s not what we seek in the journey to finding meaning that determines where we end up, but rather the seeking in and of itself, in the moment, for the future does not exist nor the past and thus in the right-here-and-right-now we have a choice, a choice to believe in something grander, that there is an underlying purpose to this strange world in which some people live in suburban Dallas and spend their weekends driving around in Excursions and eating Chic-Fil-A (mind you, a great life) and others fish from canoes off remote islands in the farthest reaches of Kiribati while others still log onto the Internet and befriend peers on Minecraft and talk shit on Discord servers round the globe while old Dominican men play dominos in Riverside Park in the long July days of an Uptown summer….we have a choice to believe that there’s something bigger, Tolstoy would argue, and we each have a choice as to what we call or do not call that Something-ness, but its name is of no importance in the face of the urgency of first just seeking It, for all time spent defining something infinite is both futile in that a limited being is throwing darts at a dictionary when words by definition imply duality and multiplicity and cannot convey monism nor the Infinite….and even if somehow successful, all time spent defining is time not spent seeking, so seek, he says, and be welcomed into the paradox that the seeking, not the finding, was the goal all along. That “thing”, for me, I think, or thought that night, to the best of my very selfish, very naive and very fried 32 year old brain…is Unconditional Love…or as I’d prefer to call it,

Kindness.

Tolstoy’s dream, in full here:

Here is the dream: I see that I am lying in bed. Feeling neither good nor bad, I am lying on my back. But I begin to wonder whether it is a good thing for me to be lying there; and it seems to me that there is something wrong with my legs; whether they are too short or uneven, I do not know, but there is something awkward about them. As I start to move my legs, I begin to wonder how and on what I am lying, something that up till now had not entered my mind. Looking about my bed, I see that I am lying on some cords woven together and attached to the sides of the bed. My heels are resting on one of the cords and my lower legs on another in an uncomfortable way.

Somehow I know that these cords can be shifted. Moving one leg, I push away the furthest cord. It seems to me that it will be more comfortable that way. But I have pushed it too far away; I try to catch it, but this movement causes another cord to slip out from under my legs, leaving them hanging down. I rearrange my whole body, quite certain I will be settled now; but this movement causes still other cords to shift and slip out from under me, and I see that the whole situation is getting worse: the whole lower part of my body is sinking and hanging down, and my feet are not touching the ground. I am supported only along the upper part of my back, and for some reason I begin to feel not only uncomfortable but terrified. Only now do I ask myself what had not yet occurred to me: where am I and what am I lying on? I begin to look around, and the first place I look is down toward where my body is dangling, in the direction where I feel I must soon fall. I look below, and I cannot believe my eyes. I am resting on a height such as I could never have imagined, a height altogether unlike that of the highest tower or mountain.

I cannot even tell whether I can see anything down below in the bottomless depths of the abyss over which I am hanging and into which I am drawn. My heart stops, and I am overcome with horror. It is horrible to look down there. I feel that if I look down, I will immediately slip from the last cord and perish. I do not look, yet not looking is worse, for now I am thinking about what will happen to me as soon as the last cord breaks. I feel that I am losing the last ounce of my strength from sheer terror and that my back is slowly sinking lower and lower. Another instant and I shall break away. And then a thought occurs to me: this cannot be real. It is just a dream. I will wake up. I try to wake up, but I cannot. ‘What am I to do, what am I to do?’ I ask myself, looking up.

Above me there is also an abyss. I gaze into this abyss of sky and try to forget about the one below, and I actually do forget. The infinity below repels and horrifies me; the infinity above attracts me and gives me strength. Thus I am hanging over the abyss suspended by the last of the cords that have not yet slipped out from under me. I know I am hanging there, but I am only looking upward, and my terror passes. As it happens in a dream, a voice is saying, ‘Mark this, this is it!’ I gaze deeper and deeper into the infinity above me, and I seem to grow calm. I recall everything that has happened, and I remember how it all came about: how I moved my legs, how I was dangling there, the horror that came over me, and how I was saved from the horror by looking up. And I ask myself, ‘Well, am I still hanging here?’

And as soon as I glance around, I feel with my whole body a support that is holding me up. I can see that I am no longer dangling or falling but am firmly supported. I ask myself how I am being supported; I touch myself, look around, and see that there is a single cord underneath the centre of my body, that when I look up I am lying on it firmly balanced, and that it alone has supported me all along. As it happens in a dream, the mechanism by which I am supported seems quite natural, understandable, and beyond doubt, in spite of the fact that when I am awake the mechanism is completely incomprehensible. In my sleep I am even astonished that I had not understood this before. It seems that there is a pillar beside me and that there is no doubt of the solidity of the pillar, even though it has nothing to stand on. The cord is somehow very cleverly yet very simply attached to the pillar, leading out from it, and if you place the middle of your body on the cord and look up, there cannot even be a question of falling. All this was clear to me, and I was glad and at peace. Then it is as if someone is saying to me, ‘See that you remember.’

And I awoke.

The way the human mind works is strange. I recognize that this is not a profound statement, nor a fresh one. But to think that sometimes I’m walking around Chinatown outside my house eating egg yolk buns from Golden Steamer wondering about plate tectonics or why we’ve managed to make such tremendous technological advancement and yet Bluetooth still never seems to work with my speaker…and still other times I’m on a beach in a place far from home and a little crack in existence opens up and I get to feel a part-of…this wild undulation from the mystical to the mundane used to gnarl at me but now, in my 30’s and realizing that ultimately how others feel about you matters far less than how you feel about yourself, I’m coming around to liking the whole dance.

A smiled and then said thank you aloud as some sort of affirmation that I was taken care of by the Universe, a big act for someone crippled by a lifelong need to be cool and a deep resistance to Goop products and the Eat Pray Love fanbase. But I said it, I said it to the ocean and to the sky, and I’m here to say that it made me not only feel good, not only better, but truly happy that night in Portugal.

I made a commitment to myself to abandon goals that were thinly veiled attempts at external validation and get back to the pre-school basics of just being nice to people without expecting anything in return. To prioritize unexpectant kindness in the most underwhelming of circumstances - in delis, on the train, dare I say it…on the phone with the Chase Banking credit card customer service line. To see what happens if I stay put in New York for months in a row instead of traveling non-stop and to start first by remembering how much of a privilege it is to even have that optionality.

I walked through the darkness and somehow summoned a ride share on just two bars of 3G service.

In the cab home I thought of two quotes that could be seen as bookending the spectrum of consideration I’d just experienced on that beach, pasted below:

I saw a mass of matter of a dull gloomy color between the North and the East, and was informed that this mass was human beings, in as great misery as they could be, and live; and that I was mixed up with them and hence forth I must not consider myself as a distinct or separate being

John Woolman

There is no one in the world who cannot arrive without difficulty at the most eminent perfection by fulfilling with love obscure and common duties.

J.P. de Caussade

I acknowledged that I have no monopoly on being miserable or insecure or lonely or just tired and that my familiarity with negative feelings meant nothing more than that I too was a chunk of cookie-dough-looking-humanness clumped in with the rest of us and that I’d better get started on seeing myself as part of Woolman’s mass, the great Goop chunk of humankind. But I also acknowledged that the solution was one that far brighter and kinder people had worked out many years before I and one that many more would sort out after me…Caussade’s point that ultimately contentment and the winning of this game of life starts by just putting other people before yourself in the most underwhelming and daily of actions.

I have a copy of Thomas Merton’s No Man Is An Island that is maybe the fourth copy I’ve owned - my dad gave me it when I turned eighteen and I plan to do the same with my kids (I also plan to give my kids aluminum foil and tell them to put it in the microwave and glue their faces to the window until something profound happens, but I’m unsure as to the relevance of that parenting effort to this blog post).

I’ve taken these copies all over the world — an interesting feat for someone who’s not a Christian to wander around with a series of essays on loving God from a celibate Carthusian monk. But Merton was not just a monk, he was also at one point a debaucherous twenty-something New Yorker who nearly a hundred years ago woke up to the fact that their had to be more in life than blacking out and chasing girls around Manhattan, and that whatever that something else may be, it had to be big and important and he’d have to turn himself over to it if he ever wanted to solve the puzzle.

In its prologue, he wrote the following, perhaps the paragraph of literature I’ve read more than any other except the first page of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy and the first and second pages of Franny & Zooey, detailed here:

“Our life, as individual persons and as members of a perplexed and struggling race, provokes us with the evidence that it must have meaning. Part of the meaning still escapes us. Yet our purpose in life is to discover this meaning, and live according to it. We have, therefore, something to live for. The process of living, of growing up, and becoming a person, is precisely the gradually increasing awareness of what that something is.

He then starts the first chapter, “Love Can Only Be Kept By Giving It Away”, with a line I remember sticking out to me even when I was an egomaniacal douchebag eighteen year old in 2008 when TikTok hadn’t melted us yet and Donald Trump was still just an orange man on TV shows and COVID-19 like Voldemort in the first Harry Potter was hiding out in the Black Forest in the bloodstream of pangolins not having achieved full form and the world still thought that a housing crisis was the worst thing they’d have to ever face:

“A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy”.

I realize that I’ve written more than six thousand words and hardly touched on Portugal. So I’ll say this. Portugal is a beautiful, beautiful country. Achingly so. It stands with a humble confidence stemming from its past glory but without the self-hating nostalgia one might find in parts of America’s Rust Belt or in the appliance aisles of the world’s remaining Sears department stores. It’s proud and bright and colorful and so are the people. This is a place where people have smile lines on their faces. They eat well, they drink well, they take life slowly and they’re kind to strangers like me who show up wearing Doc Martens in 90 degree weather pretending to be unique even though their are entire subway cars on the 6 train of people who look just like me and also listen to Kikagaku Moyo and claim to have discovered them “seven years ago in the third ring of Spotify’s hell”. They nod to their history, and there’s a lot to nod to in Lisbon. I couldn’t find an ugly street, and on one occasion I stumbled up a staircased alley only to find a literal Roman amphitheater nestled between buildings that despite being a thousand years newer than the amphitheater are still four hundred years old today.

Portugal, and the Portuguese, seem to have figured out what I describe above without the need for pretentious quote-quoting or years of self-destruction to arrive at simple profundities - that being nice to people answers all the questions, that octopus soup solves most spiritual maladies and that walking in the Sun seems to force even the Scrooge-iest members of this dull gray mass of humanity to smile and not take their shit so goddamn seriously.

I hope you enjoy these pictures of Lisbon in lieu of any real description of the place above.

And please, go to places that make you think.

Go to Portugal.