Not Your Typical Apology
It Snowed in Lisbon
Dear U,
I’m late with this issue, so please accept an apology (mot du jour!). And not just my own - you’ll catch my drift in a few paragraphs.
Reading this piece by the amazing Nathaniel Drew somehow took me back to my childhood and inspired me to write this little reflective memoir (same title I gave it in Portuguese, way back when).
Love and seasonal greetings,
N
It Snowed in Lisbon
I remember it well. I would come home from school and reenact what I had seen during the day that caught my attention the most.
The dramas of human life, the tears, the intensities, people‘s relationships. Unruly kids being punished, sometimes slapped by teachers and school staff who had no qualms about it. I couldn’t take my eyes off those scenes as they unfolded from start to finish.
This was Lisbon in the late seventies. School was never easy for me and I was never a “child” as such, or not really, or not like the others.
As an avid observer, I reported back to the headquarters of my own mind, where I proceeded to deconstruct whatever I’d witnessed. Much of it escaped my understanding. But I would not give up. A researcher from a young age, a spy of sorts, a philosophy lover even: only now do I realise that opening The Apology of Socrates by Plato that time was hardly an accident. Life would never be the same.
Again, not that I got it in its entirety. But I understood something. Which can only mean I understood: I had been right to suspect there was a level of complexity to being human. So I read between the lines of everything anyone would say or do. I refused to be fooled by the obvious or the apparent.
Despite his eloquent defence (the actual meaning of Apologia in Greek), the jury finds Socrates guilty. Ah, so telling the truth was not always appreciated… Never mind. Right there, I sided with those who sided with it. I already felt like an outsider anyway. Only this time, I belonged - at home in a book as Socrates spoke.
Was the whole world a jury? Not on a hot, drowsy August afternoon dragging on. Captured by the slowness of it all, many succumbed to sleep. Not me. I learned to wait, both patiently and impatiently.
The book was part of a reasonable literary collection my parents kept in our little summer house (a hundred odd volumes or so). I remember opening it and reading a few sentences. The rest is history? The rest is magic carpet, syndrome of the eternal student, and a life of contemplation.
Prior to this episode, I probably had no idea that books could get this deep. That day marked a palpable change in awareness. Summertime would no longer bore me. I now needed adults to indulge in those endless naps as I daydreamed my way into another world.
One winter - maybe that same year? - my teacher gave us all a writing assignment and I again experienced a very particular sensation, akin to that sense of immersion.
As it snowed in Lisbon for the first time in half a century or so, I decided to write about it. I believe I still have that page somewhere (I hope I do…). I even won a little prize for it, or a mention of honour or something. The teacher already called me the king of verbs. I was touched, though this was not exactly the kind of attention I coveted. It was just not cool. Being naughty was the coolest, but that is not what I was known for. Not at that point, anyway.
For what it’s worth, my fascination with human relationships and my wish for everyone to be okay did not go away.
Acting it out whenever I saw someone upset was perhaps how I coped with just how much it affected me, especially if I deemed it unfair. Alone in my room, I became both the actor and the audience in my mental theatre.
I would repeat the same scene several times over, potentially adding details / layers of drama as I saw fit. I would both cry and console, defend and say sorry, condemn and forgive. I had empathy and enough imagination to build a plot.
What started as a coping mechanism soon turned into a way of learning, even living. Those inner role-plays were the precursor to my lifelong explorations of the mind / heart / soul. As a matter of fact, I still do them.