There are people who pass through life. And there are those who quietly gather it, as though every passing hour were a fragile shell left behind by the retreating sea. Some collect photographs. Others collect accomplishments. Nuno Costa Santos collects instants.

He does so with the patient devotion of someone who understands that eternity rarely announces itself through extraordinary events. More often, it hides in the almost invisible moments that most people discard without noticing: the murmur of a neighborhood café, the hesitant smile of a stranger, the silence between two sentences, a football match watched beside a son, the melancholy light of an afternoon already becoming memory. It is there, in that humble and almost sacred territory of the everyday, that one of Portugal’s most singular contemporary voices has patiently built his literary universe.

To speak with Nuno Costa Santos is to discover that he is, before anything else, a guardian of transience.

His writing has never sought the spectacular. It distrusts noise, avoids literary exhibitionism, and resists the tyranny of certainty. Instead, it inhabits that delicate frontier where poetry embraces humor, where irony softens melancholy, and where the ordinary reveals its unsuspected grandeur. His celebrated Melancómico is perhaps the finest expression of this philosophy—not merely a literary creation, but almost an emotional geography where laughter and sadness cease to be opposites and become, instead, two dialects of the same human condition.

Appropriately, the conversation begins not with literature, but with coffee. “It is an addiction,” he confesses almost mischievously. “I drink a lot of it.” But the coffee itself is merely a pretext. What truly draws him to cafés is something infinitely more important: people.

“Yes, it is a way of concentrating,” he says when asked why he prefers writing there. Then comes the revelation that perhaps unlocks his entire body of work: “I write better with noise… but also with other hearts near me, other breathing, other human beings.”

That sentence alone could serve as the epigraph to his life’s work. For Costa Santos, solitude is never absolute. Even the writer who withdraws from society secretly longs for its pulse. He believes artists inhabit a beautiful contradiction: they seek seclusion, yet need human presence to nourish their imagination.

“Even if they are not speaking to anyone in the café,” he reflects, “they are observing, feeling other people, interacting in their own way.” Few contemporary writers describe so eloquently the silent labor of observation. That gaze was shaped, inevitably, by the islands.

Although born in Lisbon almost by accident while his father worked there, Costa Santos has always understood himself as belonging to São Miguel. Yet the geography of his imagination is more complex than birthplace or residence. When he left the Azores at eighteen, he discovered something extraordinary: rather than allowing the city to overwhelm him, he quietly transformed it.

“I had the need to ‘insularize’ Lisbon,” he says with remarkable simplicity. “I divided it into islands, into places of greater intimacy, less connected to the abstraction, coldness, and distance that cities often have.”

It is one of the most beautiful descriptions of exile one is likely to encounter. Most emigrants carry the island within themselves. Costa Santos did something even more subtle: he recreated the island wherever he lived.

Neighborhoods became archipelagos. Cafés became harbors. Familiar faces became coastlines against which the vast anonymity of the metropolis gently broke. The Azores ceased to be merely a place of origin; they became a way of inhabiting the world. Perhaps that explains why his literature seems perpetually suspended between territories.

He rarely embraces absolutes. He distrusts rigid categories. His work inhabits intersections—between literature and television, between radio and essays, between poetry and comedy, between melancholy and joy.

“I never think beforehand that I’m going to do that,” he says of this constant blending of genres. “But I always end up there. I’ve realized that’s simply who I am.” Such creative restlessness has also kept him, by his own admission, in “a certain clandestinity.” There is no trace of bitterness in that observation, only honesty.

“I think I have this problem of a certain clandestinity,” he reflects. “Perhaps it’s my more indie side.” Rather than cultivating a single recognizable public identity, he has wandered freely through radio, television, screenwriting, literature, cultural programming, teaching, and essays, gathering audiences instead of manufacturing fame.

It is a rare form of artistic integrity in an age that increasingly rewards repetition over curiosity. If one theme returns insistently throughout the conversation, however, it is not literature but time. Again and again, Costa Santos speaks of memory almost as a moral responsibility. “I have a tendency toward a melancholic appreciation of the past,” he admits, “as though everything were precious and deserved to be kept.”

He recalls watching Portugal play football beside his eleven-year-old son, not because the match itself mattered more than thousands of others, but because he suddenly became aware that this particular moment would never exist again. “He is eleven years old,” he says quietly. “The next World Cup only comes four years from now.” What moves him is not sport. It is mortality. Not death itself, but the relentless awareness that every beautiful instant is already disappearing while we are still living it. “There are two ideas,” he reflects. “One is the appreciation of life. The other is the permanent awareness that one day all of this will end.”

There is, however, nothing despairing in this melancholy. Costa Santos makes a profound distinction between what he calls destructive nostalgia and productive nostalgia. “There is depressive nostalgia,” he says, “and there is nostalgia that is productive.” It is the kind that allows us to say, with gratitude rather than sorrow, how wonderful it was to have lived this. That distinction illuminates everything he writes. Memory is not an escape from the present. It is the means by which the present acquires meaning.

His reflections naturally return to the Azores. He reveals that he is completing what he describes as neither a travel book nor conventional history, but a meditation born of many years spent thinking about the archipelago—its language, its landscapes, its people, and what he calls its “archipelagic unity.” Living in Terceira for several years only deepened that vision, allowing him to contemplate the islands not individually but as parts of a larger emotional geography.

The conversation eventually turns toward our digitally saturated age, and here Costa Santos becomes quietly prophetic. He does not reject technology. Indeed, the old notebook that once accompanied him everywhere has become a digital notebook. What he rejects is the culture of permanent agitation. “We are too connected online,” he observes. “Technology has become overwhelming and dictatorial, and we all submit to it.” Social media, he argues, has normalized addiction without acknowledging it. “They affect our neurochemistry, as drugs do,” he says. “The difference is that with drugs we recognize addiction. With social media, we normalize it.”

Against that relentless noise, his proposal is almost monastic in its simplicity: disconnect, if only for a while. Watch a football match without commentators. Listen again to silence. Recover the forgotten dignity of attention.

And perhaps that is what Nuno Costa Santos has been teaching us all along. Not how to write. Not even how to remember. But how to look. To look slowly enough that the ordinary reveals itself as miraculous.

To understand that neighborhoods can become islands, cafés can become cathedrals of human observation, memory can become an act of resistance, and literature can still rescue from oblivion those infinitely small moments from which an entire life is secretly composed.

In the end, his greatest subject has never been melancholy, nor humor, nor even the Azores. It has always been the quiet miracle of being alive long enough to notice that nothing—absolutely nothing—is ever ordinary.

Diniz Borges, based on a superb interview in Portuguese that are part of the projecr Complexo N. You can read these in Portuguese on Facebook. Images from Comploxo N

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