In the Northeast, it has been a rainy Spring. My Uncle Charlie tells me that in all of May and June combined there has been only one rain-free weekend. Rain is forecast for the next several days. (This is written June 18th, 20003). After a long dry period, the reservoirs are filling. We need water to live. We are the ocean. In a consumerist culture, however, too much rain is bad for business. Life is uncertain. In Denmark, a television weatherman once said tomorrow’s forecast was too difficult to predict. He lost his job.

Last weekend, I went to my 40th Class Reunion at Williston Academy (called Williston Northampton School these days) in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Out of a class of 104, 15 were in attendance. Early Saturday, the employees began bringing the outdoor cocktail furniture indoors, out of the rain. I spent a few hours in the darkened student center, called the STU BOP. It was quiet, gloomy. I could see the handrails of the reconditioned site, once water-filled, steamy, yelling and screaming, and shrieking whistles - the old swimming pool where Williston regularly broke national prep school records. Now all was quiet. I could see the raindrops hitting a new patio outside. I was doubting my worth again, getting bogged down in gloomy thoughts, and could not concentrate, to make use of the idled time, on writing a “Preface” for my new Portugal book.

By the fall of l961, figuring that I’d be better recast in tight colorful tee-shirts instead of jackets and ties, I was back in high school, wanting to be a teenager instead of a preppie. I spent many hours in the old Northampton YMCA weight room and hung around with the very few Puerto Ricans of then. It was a routine that would ultimate see me fascinated with Portugal, but of course I didn’t know that then. Life in its paths is as difficult to perceive, as a solid trend, as the vagaries of the fickle climate. One of my behavioral creases, as I look back on it, was in adapting my inferior functions, if I get my terminology right, what I couldn’t seem to express inside the jacket of my own personality, into that of people’s, conducive situations, and finally, real cultures, more or less the opposite of mine. In short, there is a psychological angle to my odyssey and that means the Portuguese thing is super-important to me, but is also part of my objective reality, and, if you look for what most Americans look for, perhaps money is the ultimate test of this.

The great truths are not, by definition, easily learned. The tendency to make embarrassing mistakes, say, and feel conflicted by them, hit all people in all cultures. It is called “vergonha” and too many words in the Protestant culture from which I was born. Summer time is a good time to clarify the ambiguities. I am bewildered at how fast time flies. It is logical for a person of my age, 58, to feel this way. The decades tick by like the second hands of a clock, and how perspective itself becomes a burden for language to describe. A summer theme now presents itself. It is called “think up a goal and work towards it.” Or, transposed from a conversation with Uncle Charlie this morning: “make sure the invention comes from a question clearly stated.”

My goal, for a long time, was avoiding myself. I did this by changing my mind a lot. I quit high school and joined the Army. I watched President Kennedy at Fleigerhorst Kaserne, Hanau, West Germany, from the thicket of 15,000 G.I. as he rode around, standing up, in the car in which he would six months later be killed. I walked by that car in the motor pool for a week before he came. I had seen him in Mexico City the summer before as he and Jackie exited an Opera performance on the Paseo de la Reforma. I spent my 21st birthday in Barcelona, Spain, in the naughty part, Last Ramblas, a two-week “leave” that effectively turned the detours of my life into a superhighway, ultimately leading to Portugal. By the way, I was out of the Army in January l966, just in time to buy the last remaining single-cylindered English motorcycle, a Matchless G80. Hey, we are built of many pieces, and it all comes together in Portugal, the way I see it, metaphorically, and in fact.

A few things that I have learned after 58 ? years is that most people, Portuguese included, don’t know much about geography, that is, where pieces of land are relative to where you are. I hear a lot of “over there” or “down there” in the going lingo. Our maps contain dotted lines with the names of countries. It comes as a surprise that dotted lines do not exist. I remember my first time to Montreal. How beautiful the land looked above the sad strip of New York state prisons. There were apple orchards, country lanes, and the people spoke French.

The main contribution to the illusion of borders is the bias of history. Fuentes de Oñoro, like Salvaterra de Miño across the river of the same name from Monção, has less personality than Vilar Formosa. In my multiple frontier crossings between Spain and Portugal, the most dramatic point of contemplation and which I write about in my forthcoming book “Dreaming Portugal” is looking out on the plains of the Spanish extremadura, seeing the city of Badajoz transformed into a necklace of jewels; the vantage point being the muralhas of Elvas, Alentejo, a mysterious, and lovely, Portuguese town.

A confusion of the “here” from the “there” is a fair complication, and I’ll venture to offer that human nature is also biological, and language fails to correct a host of self-protective “errors.” Summer is a good time to work out a philosophy, read something serious, get better at something, memorize something, stop your car and get a turtle off the road; and, in a small way, regain some of the ancient mastery of the human puzzle.

Summer is a metaphor for life in its grandest, most colorful phase. As a season, it is shorter than it seemed when young. Learning how to understand and appreciate that the colors woven into the costume come from long ingrained perceptions. Learning is seeing the shape of the trees and the curve in the valley. Learning implies that the appreciation must be transfer, and affection must be the medium, else the super-duper important question not be answered.
Once in a while, especially while collecting books, geology, history, and on Portugal, I realize with dismay that very little is passed on from generation to generation. Perfectly good books are abandoned. Affection of life is decoded into diagrams. Attention is lost. The world is in a hurry. This is a real shame. There are many reasons to go slow, in part because, as everyone knows, people who state complicated things in a hurry usually don’t have much information. In the Portugal guise, this is not woeful, even though illiteracy has been rampant throughout history, because the Portuguese people have an understated grace and politeness about them, least the Portuguese of the countryside. In the broad brush stroke, where culture seems so lively and right, people know next to nothing about the sources of their own traditions, and the best lessons of an age, surviving, loving, and celebrating life, on the upswing, turns into a way of being, and which that could use a little more of the inquiry mode, of the kind that settled, too deeply, too seriously, into the dour, individualistic Protestant mold of the northern countries (what, for so long, I was trying to get away from…)

The “well stated question” that we need to hear is “what motivates?” I’d say taking the leap of faith towards “trust” is a start, different from my grandmother saying, “Make so-and-so do thus and so…” Maybe the best advice towards respecting words, written and unwritten, in itself a wondrous distillation of many exotic tapestries, came from four big white words on the back of a tractor trailer truck cab, one that was hurtling by me in Downeast Maine.
It said, “Learn to be still.” LEARN TO BE STILL.
That’s it! Just in one spot and get used to the music in your brain. Remember the words of Caleb, a music teacher, “Boredom starts from within.” Tell someone about your dreams. But don’t tell more than 30 seconds worth or your conversation partner will think you a bore. Enjoy the sensation of being alive, rain or shine. Kick back and get yourself a wider perspective. Mine the veins of language, English or Portuguese. People will think more of you. Make life get longer by making time slow down. No better way than by investigating a random few summer classics:

1) Any good book on the Crusades or the Inquisition, seamless history of Portugal and Spain, lights up the shadows of the human mind, and explain complexes still in existence today.
2) “The Golden Bough” by Sir James George Frazer, originally pub. 1922, which treats “the derivation of myth” in an anthropological way that reveals the “shaman” as the world’s first figure gone off on a “power trip”
3) “The Voyage of the Armada” by David Howarth, originally pub. l981, which reveals the Portuguese lack of enthusiasm in Spain’s idiotic sea adventure to the British Isles
4) “The Knights Templar” by Stephen Howarth, 1982, spin-off sociology from The Crusades, the first of several religious orders of fighting monks, welcomed in Portugal after being brutalized by the king of France
5) “Jihad, The Trail of Political Islam” by Gilles Kepel, 2002, helping to explain the roots of religious chaos.

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