Karlsruhe hauptbahnhof, June 2018
Images
View from a Ferris Wheel
“I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.”
― E.B. White, The Points Of My Compass
Porto, June 2018
Looking back
Not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future
“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Irrevocable condition
It has taken me half a lifetime and a little over 100 days to realize that this where I belong. Because I eventually had to come home.
Largo dos Leōes, Porto, April 2018
References
Unlikely
Me aged 2. It didn’t seem plausible but I did grow up. And, surprisingly enough, not into a fearless tomboy.
“How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Parallels and intersections
From time to time a smile is turned upon us
A smile that blinds with blitheness, overspending
Upon this gasping sightless round of fun …
Das Karussell, Jardin du Luxembourg, Rainer Maria Rilke
Photo: San Diego, 2014
We are born at sunset
The gliding Lethe leads her silent flood
The souls that throng the flood
Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow’d:
In Lethe’s lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.
Photo: Ponte de Lima (2017) I have spent a lot of happy and not so happy days in this place during my childhood and teenage years. A village which is known for a legend of forgetfulness has helped me to know a little bit more of who I am.
References
The Aeneid by Virgil
I’d rather stop
This is not a good photo. I couldn’t get out of the car and attempt a proper photo, the letter box stands right by a traffic light and words on walls and urban equipments tend to vanish quickly, so you get them when you spot them.
Pause and reflect on the [your / mine] path
That’s how it reads to me. That’s what’s lacking, the time to stop and try to see the direction.
Only a ten minute drive
And the World is different. And it’s summer in February even though it’s still the Northern Hemisphere.
Photo: last Sunday, somewhere in Gondomar
The world forgetting by the world forgot
Living by the sea
“When I die I will return to seek
The moments I did not live by the sea.”
Sophia De Mello Breyner
Selected Poems, translated by Richard Zenith, Carcanet Press, 1997.
even though it isn’t mine
even though I feel at home in most places I travel to, even though I can’t wait to leave, even though it now looks mostly as a theme park, I sometimes can’t help but feel that Porto belongs to me because I belong to it.
References
Truman Capote
Stories from A Closet of Errors 