Too Present the Past

I have been considering the past a lot lately. It’s hard not to, when I traipse over roughened cobblestone streets in the morning that have existed, in some form or another, for approximately 300 years. It’s difficult to forget when I frequent a candle shop which has been in business at the same location for 220 years. And it doesn’t help when, every morning, my first view is a river that carried every major explorer for the past 500 years.

Much has been written about the “weight” or the “burden” of the past on its people. I sense no bowed shoulders or heavy thoughts here. What is fascinating, though, is the interaction that these people have with their own history. One of the first museums that we visited was the Museu Arquelogico do Carmo, a cathedral that remains open to the elements, yet is still filled with ruins and artifacts. Nothing is behind glass or temperature controlled. Nothing is “protected”. I ran my fingers of the roughened surface of a 350-year old tombstone, guiltily at first, and then more confident as I realized no one was going to arrest me. One picture remains indelibly burned in my mind: a child, no more than a toddler really, climbing inside an ancient Roman fountain in order to play. Part of me wanted to rush over there and yank the child out admonishing the whole way. The other part of me was charmed.

These images lay heavy on my mind, my own assumed “weight” of the past. Did the Portuguese have so little respect for the past? Was history too present for them to ever take it seriously? Or was I simply being neurotic in my foreignness?

Some days later, I visited the Parque das Nacoes of Lisbon, a futuristic water development north of the city center that was created in 1998. It boasts everything the modern human might want: a shopping mall, an aquarium, state-of-the-art hotels, and a cable car system from which to sigh over it. But as I stared at its tangled, gleaming twists of white and silver steel, it struck me that the overall impression was of a child grasping at ideas of modernity and the future without comprehending them. This place was trying too hard.

In the United States, it seems as if there are no barriers between us and the future. For the most part, we revel in technological change, welcoming and integrating with every step of the way. But this, in turn, creates a barrier between us and the past. We’re so careful of it, so proud of it, that we slap pieces of history under 5” glass and carefully regulated lighting, while never realizing the barrier we created in our protectiveness. In Portugal, it’s just the opposite. Their present and their past are inextricably linked, woven together so seamlessly that it’s hard to differentiate between the two. Their churches, their cobblestone streets, their bakeries, all a part of history and all utilized every day in the present. It is history without reverence, without precision, without detachment. But again, this creates a barrier between them and the future, to the point where they can envision it, but never integrate it.

Is one way better than the other? Who’s to say? Certainly not I. But as I was walking through the sleek modernity of Lisbon, awed with the aquarium built to float on the water, I tripped on something. I looked down. Cobblestones. Cobblestones amongst this expensive altar of modernity. I laughed all the way to the cable cars.