![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elmostrador.cl\/media\/2010\/06\/Jos%C3%A9-Saramago-3_230x230.jpg?w=660\")
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Been thinking about Portugal in the last couple of days, because of the death of Jose Saramago<\/a>, and the impending departure from work of visiting Portuguese academic Rosa. I travelled through Portugal in October 2002 and it made a huge impression on me. I stayed in the country much longer than I intended, and was impressed by the massive diversity (both geographical and cultural) within such a small area.<\/p>\n “Portugal is cursed by God” – graffiti in Lisboa Saramago was the source of my initial interest – the other moose loaned me The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis<\/a><\/em> and it blew my head off. It also made me realize that I knew virtually nothing about Portugal, couldn’t even point to it on a map. And this one of the great powers of the age of exploration with colonies all over the world – a faded light, Ricardo Reis<\/em> suggested, lost in an unarticulated sorrow.<\/p>\n “We are a sad people” – Tanya, a Portuguese girl I met in Lisboa, October 20th, 2002.<\/p>\n Saramago is probably my favourite author, inasmuch as I have a favourite author; I’ve enjoyed every book of his I’ve read. Their clever, magical concepts are expressed with a distinctive, embracing style, the kind of style I need to fight to kick out of my own writing for weeks afterward. More than this, however, what I think of when I think of Saramago is compassion. This is of a piece with his high concepts and his style – his authorial voice is embedded in the text, allowing the reader to sense his great compassion for his characters, and by extension, for the human condition.<\/p>\n That first Saramago book, Ricardo Reis, introduced me to writer\/poet Fernando Pessoa<\/a>, whose Book of Disquiet<\/a> I read while travelling through Portugal. The straight-faced melancholy of the book served as counterpoint to everything I saw and did.<\/p>\n “Life is whatever we make it. The traveller is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are.” – Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet<\/em><\/p>\n “I say grab life with both hands” – text received from my friend Alastair while in Portugal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Been thinking about Portugal in the last couple of days, because of the death of Jose Saramago, and the impending departure from work of visiting Portuguese academic Rosa. I travelled through Portugal in October 2002 and it made a huge impression on me. I stayed in the country much longer than I intended, and was … Continue reading Saramago, Portugal<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[71,23,72],"class_list":["post-1572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-and-also","tag-portugal","tag-reviews","tag-travel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-pm","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1572"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2875,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions\/2875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n“[pi]=3.14” – graffiti at the Ancora-Praia train station<\/p>\n