Visiting castles, like so many trips into the past, can awaken one to the truth of human history or put one to sleep. It is usually the latter.
The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gassett, who lived here in Lisbon for a year after fleeing Franco's Spain, said it best: "The only genuine ideas are the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, farce."
We are all shipwrecked now, not just the Portuguese sailors long lost at sea never to return to home despite the lament of the Fado singers.
If we are to make this earth our home again, we had better learn to sing a different tune. If not, we will be eliminated by accident or intent, and no one will be singing for our return. It is a harsh truth, but quite simple.
In the Foz district of Porto, Portugal on the Atlantic, in the park and on the beaches, children play and laugh and the music of their voices rises into the air to remind me that they are our hope on this dark and tempestuous sea on which we are shipwrecked, hoping to find our way home.
Dostoevsky said it well: "The soul is healed by being with children."
Can we hear their voices, singing?
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