But after all, do you know what TBT means? It is the acronym for Throwback Thursday. The first word means going back, returning, returning or revising. Along with Thursday, the acronym is translated as the Thursday of retrogression. But not in the sense of losing something or going back after an achievement. The term has the function of remembering a memorable moment recorded in old photos.
I would love to be able to go back to the days when we froze the moments in these photos. Is that you? What time would you like to return to?
And on that day so nostalgic, here I will share a beautiful text about Saudades de Lisboa published by David Mourão-Ferreira, in 'Terraço Aberto'.
Miss Lisbon
Missing Lisbon... How not to miss Lisbon, even in Lisbon? In the older neighborhoods there are certain nuclei still preserved, certain corners miraculously almost intact, but for the most part the streets we passed are no longer the streets we passed, neither the panoramas as a whole nor the detached pictures of city life are the same. from fifteen or twenty years ago. And at every step we find ourselves — all those who have crossed the mezzo del cammin — intimately confusing two superimposed images of Lisbon, without taking care to probe, more often than not, which one is the true one.
It wasn't just, in recent decades, the cadaverous increase in population; it wasn't just the doughy increase in traffic; it wasn't just the demolishing fury that descended on the city and that has systematically deprived us of architectural specimens from the last century and the beginnings of the present, to the point that the coming ones may arrive at the conclusion that we have moved, ex abruptly, from times from Senhor D. Miguel to the third quarter of the 20th century... It was something more subtle: like a strange glandular insufficiency, the kind that transforms, in the short term, a slender and savvy little girl into an anodyne, dull creature. We have the feeling that Lisbon has not grown: it has spread; and that instead of progressing, walking, exercising, he limited himself to crossing his arms, leaning back, looking at himself in the mirror, receiving visitors...
But is such an impression accurate? Isn't it, on the contrary, a symptom of our own aging or at least an indication that youth is leaving us? Does it not, in short, hide a simple phenomenon of "projection"? Probably for those who are now twenty years old — Lisbon is now twenty years old. Perhaps this “city”, more than many others, rhymes terribly with the “age” of each one. The most curious thing is that there is no lack of examples, among the authors who have written about Lisbon, of those who started to direct madrigals to it and then riddled it with plagues; and there are also cases of those who maintain an ambivalent attitude towards her - love and hate, tenderness and contempt - which perhaps, in some of them, may have originated in different phases of existence. And what is even more curious is the fact that many confess – even in Lisbon – that they miss Lisbon. (1967)
David Mourão-Ferreira, in 'Terraço Aberto'
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