Following my latest entry on Images & Words, I have decided to blog a little about Pessoa's favourite café-restaurant Martinho da Arcada, one of Lisbon's oldest cafés – dating to 1778. It is mostly known as a literature café given that famous writers used to hang around, especially Fernando Pessoa, who wrote much of his precious stuff at Martinho da Arcada that is under the XVIII century arches of Praça do Comercio, where several Portuguese ministries are located.
In its way, Martinho is one of the city's most famous restaurants, not only because of its age but also its association to Portugal's beloved poet, Fernando Pessoa, whose photos hang on the wall, just above the table and chair he used to compose some of his most famous works.
In 2009, Portugal commemorated the 120th birth anniversary of the poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under dozens of names, one of them being Bernardo Soares.
I am very fond of travelling and I presume so are many of you...the following write by Pessoa is particularly beautiful, don't you agree?
"Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning out over the street and squares, over the faces and gestures, always equal and always different, just like scenery. If I imagine, I see. What more do I do when I travel? Only extreme weakness of the imagination justifies having to travel to feel. 'Any road, this very road leading out of Entepfuhl, will take us to the end of the world.' But the end of the world, since it was consummated by being circled, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world. It's in us that the scenery has scenery. So that if I imagine it. I create it; if I create it, it exists; if it exists, then I see it like any other scenery. So why travel? In Madrid, Berlin, Persia, China, and the two poles, where would I be but in myself, and in my particular type of sensations? Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.
