Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture

by José Saramago

A journey is supposed to be cast in a different mould, a matter more of being than of moving on. Perhaps recognition should be given to professional travellers, but only for those with a genuine vocation, for the rest who believe in taking their responsibilities lightly are deceiving themselves: each kilometre is worth no less than a year of life.

the builders had renounced all trust in the certainties of this world and determined to construct for all eternity.

maybe this only serves to demonstrate our own spiritual defects in preferring to apportion blame to the land and not to those the land produces. The apple rots according to the ailment of the apple tree, and not from the sickness of the earth.

“Which country am I in?” the traveller asks his glass of wine, which fails to reply but genially permits him to continue drinking.

Repentance at not having stayed longer, for it’s hardly good behaviour to sojourn merely a brief quarter-hour in a church that’s seven hundred years old,

If he weren’t so busy doing what he’s doing, he’d merely say: “Good day,” and what more could a traveller ask for since that’s the most one can wish from a day, that it should turn out good?

In sum: this journey through Portugal is going to have a bit of everything about it.

These are the crude forebears of the new technologies that are currently transforming us into consumers and ignoramuses.

The route is a fiesta the sky accompanies, chucking whatever it can at it by way of demonstration.