For more weeks than I care to admit, I’ve been reading Jose Saramago’s Journey to Portugal. Saramago makes it clear that he is not a tourist; indeed, Portugal is his native land. But he is a traveller, and there is scarcely a hamlet that he doesn’t cover in this tome. 

I picked it up because we are going to Portugal this summer (in a couple of days, in fact), and I thought the words of a Nobel Prize winner might be good ones to take along. 

The ones that strike my fancy now, though, apply not just to Portugal but to any journey. He uses them to describe the Roman ruins in the city of Evora. 

The paths trodden by men are only complicated at first sight. When we look more closely, we can see traces of earlier feet, analogies, contradictions that have been resolved or may be resolved at some future date, places where suddenly languages are spoken in common and become universal.

 “Traces of earlier feet…” — that’s an image I won’t forget.