Wednesday 5 August 2009

Strait

I look at the Strait. I'm imagining Magalhães with its beard flying with the Strait's strong wind while he looks at it, as I do now, with a curious look in his face, the curious look of the Portuguese of those times, who fearlessly sailed around the World. Looking for what? Fortune? Fame? Purely to overcome their own limits? I think they simply came because they had to. Magalhães came because he had a vision, because his instinct told him to come. And I think this especially because he refused to give up when the Portuguese King closed his doors to his ideas. Instead Magalhães looked for alternatives, knocking at the doors of his Spanish neighbors. He came because he had to. He didn't care about being mistaken, he knew being wrong was part of life, the act of living. And he came to give his name to the World, spoken nowadays in diverse ways and with pronunciations distinct from the correct Portuguese one, where difficult ães, ãos and ões abound, those sounds which non-Portuguese speaking noses can't pronounce properly. And he had to really want to come here... If it is difficult to be here today looking at the Strait in its cold wind, inside warm clothes of synthetic cloths that didn't exist back then, meters away from a warm and comfortable café... I imagine how much more difficult it was back then, with years spent on a boat too small for what it had inside and for the vastness of the sea outside its thin wooden walls, while meeting foreign and distant lands, with unknown climates, people, animals, plants. Death was the only certainty and glory nothing but a mere and distant possibility. But they came anyway, him, others, so many, discovering a World which had always existed but which they connected to the rest. I look at the rough Strait and ask myself where all the courage of those Portuguese has gone... Not the courage of conquering land, that doesn't matter, but the courage of conquering different worlds, those of their own fears, breaking their own barriers, overcoming the inertia so they can fight for their dreams. I look at the Strait and can't see that courage anymore... But I can see Magalhães and his courage makes me want to be like him. I look at the Strait and, gosh!, look how beautiful it is...











Punta Arenas, Chile, May 2009

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