Dorin > Books: nobel-authors‎ (54)

“The traveller is not in a good mood when he departs. Nonetheless, he is sufficiently self-aware to suspect that his ill-humour results from an inability to reconcile two contradictory desires: that of remaining everywhere he goes with that of going everywhere he wishes.”

“The sun has set but the light is not yet gone. The countryside is bathed in gilded ash until the gold pales and the night slowly invades from the far side of the sky, as the stars light up. The noon will arrive later, and the owls are calling to one another. The traveller feels like crying at what he sees. Perhaps it’s his own pain he feels, a disgust at being unable to express in words what that landscape is. He can barely frame the words: this is a night on which the world could begin.”

“When the travellers awoke and opened the bedroom window, the world had been created. It was early, the sun was not yet up. Nowhere could be more calmly beautiful, nobody could be happier with such simple things as the broad earth, the trees, silence. The traveller, who has seen many things, appreciates these to the full, and waits for the sunrise. He experienced it all: the light gradually changing, the first shadows being created, the first birdsong, and the was the first to hear a woman’s voice calling these simple words out of the darkness: ‘It’s going to be another hot day.’ Prophetic words, as the travellers was later to learn to his cost.”

“These are complicated chapters in a general history which some people like to portray as simple: first there were the Romans, then the Visigoths and the Arabs, and then since there had to be a country called Portugal, Count Dom Enrique Sanchos appeared, followed by his son Afonso, followed by more Afonsons, a few Sanchos and Joões, Pedros and Manuéis, with an interval to allow three Spanish Felipes to put in their appearance, after the death of an unfortunate Sebastião and the battle of Alcácer Quibir. That’s all there is to it.”

“The journey is never over. Only travellers come to an end. But even then they prolong their voyage in their memories, in recollections, in stories. When the travellers sat in the sand and declared: ‘There’s nothing more to see,’ he knew it wasn’t true. The end of one journey is simply the stars of another. You have to see what you missed the first time, see again what you already saw, see in springtime what you saw in the summer, in daylight what you saw at night, see the sun shining where you saw the rain falling, see the crops growing, the fruit ripen, the stone which has moved, the shadow that was not there before. You have to go back to the footsteps already taken, to go over them again or add fresh ones alongside them. You have to start the journey anew. Always.”