Should anyone doubt mass tourism’s destruction of the very beauties that the tourists, braving inconveniences such as airports, supposedly travel to see, he could do worse than pay a visit to the Lello bookshop in Porto, Portugal.
It boasts of being the world’s most beautiful, and it is indeed very beautiful. Opened in 1906, it was the city’s first major construction in reinforced concrete, one whose exterior, however, was given a splendid neo-Gothic style. No doubt modern architects would consider this dishonest, preferring their concrete to be exposed to the elements, thereby staining horribly, all in the name of authenticity. They are like someone who would count no woman beautiful whose entrails he had not seen.
But the glory of the Lello bookshop is its interior, with its elegantly sweeping staircase, carved wooden bookshelves, and stained-glass skylight. Unfortunately, it is now a bookshop in name only: it is an institution sui generis, a backdrop to selfies. The stock of books is limited to a few titles only, in several languages, including picture books of the bookshop itself. There is little that is Portuguese about it.
It is an institution sui generis, a backdrop to selfies.
There is an urban myth that J. K. Rowling, who lived for some years in Porto working as a teacher, started her first Harry Potter novel in Lello. There is no place in the store at which she could have done so, but the interior is quite plausibly an inspiration for Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s school. (Rowling, however, denies ever having visited Lello before writing the books.) It was this association, not the chance to buy books in beautiful surroundings, that drew immense crowds of tourists to Lello, such that the bookshop decided henceforth to charge an entrance fee. You can avoid the long lines that form outside, even with ticket reservations, by buying a more expensive ticket that includes the purchase of a book, a classic text, published by the bookshop itself. I chose Luís Camões’s Os Lusíadas, the sixteenth-century epic poem of Portugal’s declining golden age, also buying separately the English translation of it by the great linguist and explorer Sir Richard Burton. Incidentally, it always surprises that so fascinating and brilliant a man as Burton wrote so badly.
The atmosphere inside is now like a crowded subway station after some important event, perhaps a football match. No doubt the business model is excellent, but the aesthetic result is lamentable.
Can one be nostalgic for what one has never known, at least not by personal acquaintance? What was the culture in which the sale of books could have been profitable enough to pay for the erection of so elaborately and expensively decorated a building? No doubt it is easy to romanticize, but it is also difficult (at least for me) not to do so.
Can one be nostalgic for what one has never known?
There must surely have existed a rich, cultivated, and well-dressed bourgeois elite for whom books were essential items, the absence of which from their homes would have been unthinkable. Reading, almost certainly in several languages, would have been for them as natural as breathing. If there were books in French and English in Lello, it would not have been because there were tourists who would buy books only in those languages. No doubt this cultivated way of life rested upon a foundation of privilege and injustice, but to regret all that ever rested upon such a foundation would be to regret civilization itself.
Porto remains beautiful, with its characteristic buildings of simple and elegant design, many bearing façades of azulejo tilework. But it is again difficult not to reflect on the extreme ugliness of our contemporary contributions to civilization. An astonishing proportion of the Portuguese, for example, are now tattooed, as if by mutilating themselves in this fashion they could catch up with nations that for three or four centuries had been more advanced than they. They have also copied superior civilizations by adorning buildings with graffiti, often outdoing their elders and betters in this respect. Unlike in some other countries, the taggers do not confine themselves largely to horrible surfaces, but also add their mite to venerable and graceful surfaces.
Is tattooing the tagging of the skin, or is tagging the tattooing of buildings? Either way, they both suggest the inflamed desire for self-expression of those who have nothing to express.
Rock music suffuses the air in the center of Porto like a form of gaseous emanation, which penetrates even into the Misericórdia, the religious foundation, now a museum, that for half a millennium dispensed charity to the sick and poor of Porto. I didn’t hear a note of fado seeping into the public space.
Is tattooing the tagging of the skin, or is tagging the tattooing of buildings?
A question of political philosophy occurred to me in Porto. No sooner had my wife and I sat down one day on the terrace of a restaurant than a busker, complete with electronic apparatus, appeared and began to sing rock songs loudly and not well. Did we not have the right to silence? Who in such a situation has the right to determine whether or not a busker can continue? The clients of the nearest establishment, and if so by majority vote alone? Or is there (as I believe) a presumptive right to silence that trumps any wish for avoidable noise, so long as someone wishes that silence? There is an analogy with smoking: the right to smoke-free air trumps any right to fill it with cigarette smoke.
If it is to be decided by a vote of all who can hear it, the question arises as to how long they must be able to hear it before they get a vote. Perhaps the city council should set the rules? And what of the busker himself, has he no rights, or at any rate interests, that should be consulted?
Be this all as it may, we soon found ourselves longing to escape the crowds, and the Cemetery of Agramonte was the perfect place to do so. It was beautifully kept, and if you peered in the right direction you could not see the atrocious modernist buildings that overlook it (Portugal has caught up with the rest of Western Europe as far as the hideousness of recent building is concerned). You could believe yourself back in the age before the architects thought that they were what Stalin thought writers ought to be, and insisted that they were, namely engineers of the soul—the soul to be engineered being that of the New Man, of course.
Agramonte is similar to Père Lachaise, but in better condition. Many eminent persons are interred there. You could tell that Portugal must until very recently have been a backward society, for none of the tombs had as yet been vandalized, nor any of the funerary ornaments stolen, as they have been in Père Lachaise. This in turn must be a sign of the persistence of a primitive respect for the dead. No doubt progress in this respect will soon be made.
It was like stepping back into the 1930s.
Still nostalgic for a past of which we had no experience, we went a few times for lunch to the Café Guarany on the Avenida dos Aliados. Apart from the inexplicable lapse in taste of a large liquid-crystal screen relaying a cookery program at which no one even glanced, and which thankfully was silent, and an appalling modern mural of Amazonian Indians from which it was possible to avert one’s eyes, it was like stepping back into the 1930s, when the café first opened its doors.
As we were lunching, an elderly bourgeois couple entered, who evidently were regulars. He had a left hemiplegia from a stroke, but could still walk, and was dressed in a suit and tie, while his wife was expensively if not elegantly dressed. It seems they dressed like that just to go out for lunch together every day; I found something heroic in their maintenance of their own standards, irrespective of the temper of the times around them.
I experienced a strange kind of relief in seeing them after spending the morning among the crowds dressed as if their clothes—T-shirts and jeans or shorts—had spent the night in a crumpled pile on the floor at the end of the bed. The obese made no attempt to hide their obesity, indeed rather the reverse, as if brazenness about their size and shape would render it more attractive. They squeezed themselves into their garments, resembling toothpaste in a tube (not that one would squeeze, even if one could), with their bulging T-shirts bearing slogans such as “Large and Proud” and “All I need is a little exercise.”
They squeezed themselves into their garments, resembling toothpaste in a tube.
What was so striking about the crowd in Porto—a crowd from all over Europe with a fair sprinkling of Americans—quite apart from the prevalence of self-mutilation by tattoo and piercing, was the complete absence of any sense of personal dignity. This is not the same as absence of ego, however; indeed, it is the very reverse. Someone with a sense of personal dignity has an idea of how others are likely to see him. Someone who has no such sense of dignity does not care what others think of him and perhaps is not even aware that he ought to care. In other words, he is a solipsist, except when he needs something from someone.
No doubt it is largely because of my age, but in many places I feel almost as though we were successful barbarians who have taken over the ruins of a civilization that we have conquered.
