That “W” in “writing” and “walking”
Sometimes this city feels like one long street. A street that goes up and down, that widens to become an avenue and then narrows back to being just an old path between houses. Sometimes Lisbon is this long and winding road — a great thing about writing in English, pardon me, is the possibility of quoting the Beatles in their own tongue —, a long and winding road finding its way through the hours.
The glasses of beer left on mailboxes and window sills during the night become urine samples in the morning; the cranes that sing hoarsely over the buildings in daytime transform into silent crosses nailed on the dusk sky. In late afternoon, the shadows of pine trees on the asphalt are so deep they change into abysses offering us a little moment of pause, our daily philosophy fix, and, at noon, the pair of small zebra rubber boots put on the sidewalk, by the waste container, make you see the transparent child that wears them looking at you with a somewhat sad smile.
Lisbon is always different. The light, an inexplicable product of hills and coast, river and sea, Atlantic and Mediterranean, Europe and Africa, is continuously changing its personality. Lisbon — Lisboa — is feminine, complex, surprising, a mystery. Wandering through its squares and alleys is getting on board of an open-ended story.
For a writer, walking is specially important. It’s good for your back pain, it puts your lungs to work, it exercises your heart, it lightens your spirit and it helps your writing. Walking can be, actually, a form of writing; very often, the best images, the most inspiring ideas come when you’re out there, under the sun, pondering over some great dillema like “should I take the Escadinhas do Duque or simply continue and walk up Praça da Alegria?”.
The great Robert Walser, the patron of walking writers, said that, without walking, he wouldn’t have written a line. To be more precise, it was the narrator of a Walser’s text called “The Walk” (from the book “Selected Stories”, translation by Christopher Middleton and others, edition by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), who calls himself “the writer, the inventor of these lines”, and what he said was: “Without walking, I would be dead, and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed.”
It’s significant that Walser is also what one might call the great writer of small things. He’s great because of his modesty, his lightness, his humor, his sense of wonder towards the world and people. Writing as he walks — that is, taking everything in, observing everything with the same authentic but still ironic quality of a man who, one fine day, put a hat on his head and went for a stroll —, he shows us life in its intricacies and contradictions. And manages to do so in a wonderfully withdrawn-yet-passionate tone that achieves what he praises in other writers like Charles Dickens or Gottfried Keller: leaves the reader not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Life’s mostly like that, isn’t it?
As this long and winding road of a city brings me closer to home, I notice the painting on the wall. I’ve seen it a thousand times: one mouth and two eyes drawn on a patch, on the yellowish wall. But, today, the clouds seem to be moving fast and the light changes in a way that brings the face to life and — it winks at me.
“But stop! Relax in brief respite”, says Walser. “Writers who understand their profession take the same as easily as possible. From time to time they like to lay their pens aside a while. Uninterrupted writing fatigues, like digging.”
So, that’s it. I got here. Have a nice week, take care.