Night Train To Lisbon.......Traces........

…….. Night Train to Lisbon…….
Traces

​Sometimes you hear, feel, see, read or whatever it and you know that it has something. It’s like your inner voice connected with that something gives you a sign. That feeling I had when I received an email from a German speaking client from one of my walking tours who suggested me to take a look at the movie ‘Night Train to Lisbon’. He was a fan of Pascal Mercier who wrote the novel, which the film is based on, he told me and he thought that this movie could make an interesting walking tour. I thanked him for the suggestion and started to think about this movie and before I knew I was in a new adventure, a movie, a book, following traces of ‘Night Train to Lisbon.’

What did I know about this movie or novel? I remember the time, it must have been around 2012 that I went to Miradouro de Santa Catharina, called Adamastor by the Locals and there were many famous Actors there. I asked some of my friends what was going on and they told me that they were shooting a movie; the first trace came to me without knowing. Later I saw the posters in the city, but I didn’t read the book, nor did I see the movie, because in Lisbon I live in my dream in a city which is a movie, with lots of history, the past everywhere alive in the now and with a different future.

​Well I started this journey to a new tour with watching the movie and later reading the book and the parallel with life. I like the movie which is very aesthetic, poetic and shows Lisbon and her attitude in a very philosophical way. The book is different, that’s normal; we are talking about different ways of creating a reality out of nothing. That is as well the similarity between a film, a novel and real life, where illusions become reality.

​After this study I saw the possibilities of a wonderful walking tour where the people will feel, the movie, the novel and will understand the city as well. On this blog I will now show some pictures from the movie and some interesting quotes, which I did choose because I liked them. Another can choose different ones; it is art as a way to life in Lisbon.

​Raimund Gregorius: Look at these eyes. Tell me what they reveal.
Mariana:      They look melancholic, but hopeful; tired, but persistent... contradictory.

---

​“Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.”

"We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place. We stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. We travel to ourselves when we go to a place. Now we have covered the stretch of our lives, no matter how brief it may have been"

​"Given that we live only a small part of what there is in us - what happens with the rest?"

Amadeu: "What could... what should be done, with all the time that lies ahead of us? Open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty? Is it a wish, dreamlike and nostalgic, to stand once again at that point in life, and be able to take a completely different direction to the one which has made us who we are?"

​Amadeu: "But by travelling to ourselves we must confront our own loneliness. And isn't it so everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? Isn't that why we renounce all the things we will regret at the end of our lives?"

“SOLIDAO, LONELINESS.
What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? ... it isn't only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth?” ​

​Amadeu: "A decisive moment of life, when its direction changes forever, are not always marked by large and shown dramatics. In truth, the dramatic moments of a life determining experience are often unbelievable, low key. When it unfolds its revolutionary effects and insures that life is revealed in a brand new light, it does that silently. And in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility."

“Don't waste your time, do something worthwhile with it."
But what can that mean: worthwhile? Finally to start realizing long-cherished wishes. To attack the error that there will always be time for it later....Take the long-dreamed-of trip, learn this language, read those books, buy yourself this jewelry, spend a night in that famous hotel. Don't miss out on yourself.
Bigger things are also part of that: to give up the loathed profession, break out of a hated milieu. Do what contributes to making you more genuine, moves you closer to yourself.” ​

“Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?” ​

“So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be.” ​

“Disappointment is considered bad. A thoughtless prejudice. How, if not through disappointment, should we discover what we have expected and hoped for? And where, if not in this discovery, should self-knowledge lie? So how could one gain clarity about oneself without disappointment?"

"One could have the hope that he would become more real by reducing expectations, shrink to a hard, reliable core and thus be immune to the pain of disappointment. But how would it be to lead a life that banished every long, bold expectation, a life where there were only banal expectations like "the bus is coming?" ​

“[Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity.” ​

“To stand by yourself -- that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself.” ​

“Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave!” 

“When we talk about ourselves, about others, or simply about things, we want- it could be said – to reveal ourselves in our words: We want to show what we think and feel. We let other have a glimpse into our soul.”

“AS SOMBRAS DA ALMA. THE SHADOWS OF THE SOUL. The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth? Is it so clear that they are your own? Is one an authority on oneself? But that isn't the question that concerns me. The real question is: In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false? In stories about the outside, surely. But when we set out to understand someone on the inside? Is that a trip that ever comes to an end? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?” ​

“Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.” “Human beings can't bear silence. It would mean that they would bear themselves.” 

“Because the one who wishes it – isn’t the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. And would he want to revoke it if he hadn’t suffered it?” ​

“Should we be grateful for the protection that guards us from the strangeness of one another? And for the freedom it makes possible? How would it be if we confronted each other unprotected by the double refraction represented by the interpreted body? If, because nothing separating and adulterating stood between us, we tumbled into each other?” ​

​“We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose color and shape change as in a kaleidoscope that is constantly shaken.”

​“Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?"

“How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be a last sentence.” ​

​“I love tunnels. They 're the symbol of hope: sometime it will be bright again. 
If by chance it is not night.”

‘A walking tour following the traces of ‘Last train to Lisbon.’
By; Dick Metzeka; Lisbon Light Walking Tours;
​'the art of Life; How to construct reality out of illusions.' 

​After I had written my new blog post, I went, as usual, walking to feel my words in fresh air, exercise and reality. And suddenly, after an hour or two walking, encounters and images like a movie, I realized what was missing. Humor!
The 'Lisbon Light Private Walking Tours', show the city and life with glasses filtered through humor. A cheerful tour that turns a holiday trip or travel, light. This tour Lisbon shows among other things by following some tracks from the film and novel "Night Train to Lisbon', respectively director Bille August and author Pascal Mercier, excel, how beautiful, aesthetic, philosophical and poetic they are realized, not exactly by humor. It fits very well in Lisbon, it's like a relative of her music, 'Fado'.
Monty Python seems far away. But don’t worry, humor will be around, otherwise it wouldn’t be a Lisbon Light Walking Tour!
Be happy! :)