There are cities through which we travel, and there are cities that, without warning, begin to travel through us. Lisbon has always belonged to the latter geography for me—a place less made of stone than of memory, less contained by its streets than by the centuries that seem to breathe beneath them. But on an August afternoon, walking down Rua Augusta with my grandchildren, Lisbon became something else entirely. The city ceased, for a while, to be the capital of the country where I was born, ceased even to be that ancient Atlantic threshold from which so many generations departed toward islands and continents unknown. It became a listening place. And perhaps that is what I will remember most: not what I showed my grandchildren of Lisbon, but what, walking beside them, they revealed to me about themselves, about America, and about the unfinished country they hope someday to inherit and help remake.
Around us was the magnificent disorder of summer. Rua Augusta belonged to thousands of people and a dozen languages. Restaurant tables spilled onto the pavement; waiters negotiated the narrow spaces between chairs and pedestrians; musicians played beneath façades that had witnessed other centuries; vendors offered food and souvenirs; shop windows competed for the attention of visitors from every imaginable corner of the world. There were the little side streets tempting us away from the great pedestrian avenue, the geometry of the Baixa opening and closing around us, and, above the roofs, the old presence of São Jorge watching from its hill. Ahead stood the triumphal arch, framing the passage toward Praça do Comércio, and beyond it the Tagus, immense and luminous, carrying the afternoon toward the Atlantic. Everything invited looking. Everything demanded photographs. Everything seemed to say: Remember me.
And yet I remember mostly voices. Their voices. My grandchildren were talking, and I was listening. There is a moment in the life of a grandparent when one realizes that the children who once seemed to belong entirely to the realm of tenderness have entered the realm of ideas. They have begun constructing their own moral architecture. They possess questions we did not give them, convictions they have arrived at without asking our permission, anxieties born from a world different from the one that formed us. If we are fortunate—and perhaps wise enough—we resist the temptation to fill every silence with our experience. We listen.
So, I listened. They spoke about America. Not the ceremonial America of monuments and anniversaries, nor the simplified country of flags and speeches, but the difficult, contradictory, unfinished America in which they are becoming adults. They spoke of freedom and of the distance that sometimes exists between the word and its fulfillment. They spoke of racial justice and social justice, of equality not as an abstraction inherited from civics books but as a moral obligation still awaiting completion. They spoke of the political atmosphere of the country, of divisions that trouble them, of rights they fear can never be taken for granted, of people who remain unheard or insufficiently protected. They spoke with that mixture of idealism and apprehension peculiar to young people who have begun to understand that history is not something that happened before they arrived. History is also the room into which they have been born.
And they spoke of dreams. Their dreams, certainly—the private architecture of what they might become, where they might go, what lives they might build—but also something larger: the country in which they want those lives to unfold. They want a freer America, a more generous America, a country less frightened by difference, more faithful to the democratic promises it has so often proclaimed and so imperfectly kept. Listening to them, I understood that their concerns were not signs of disillusionment with America. They were, in some deeper sense, expressions of faith in it. We criticize most urgently what we still believe can become better. Indifference is the true abandonment of a country. Their questioning was a form of belonging. And there was something almost unbearably beautiful about having this conversation there.
Because beneath our feet were other histories. Lisbon is old enough to make our individual certainties seem very small. Before it was ours, it belonged to others; before it spoke Portuguese, other languages rose from its hills and moved along its river. Phoenician traders knew this estuary. Romans made Olisipo part of their imperial world. Visigoths passed through its history. For centuries, Muslim Lisbon—al-Ushbuna—lived within the civilization of al-Andalus, and the Moorish presence remains inscribed not merely in archaeology and architecture but in words, habits, streets, memory itself. Jews lived, traded, studied and prayed here until intolerance and persecution tore apart communities that had helped form the intellectual and commercial life of Portugal. Christians reconquered the city in the twelfth century; kings and merchants transformed it; sailors departed from its river toward worlds Europeans scarcely understood. Africans, Europeans, Asians and peoples from across the Portuguese maritime world eventually moved through its streets. Empires gathered here and departed from here. Wealth arrived here carrying both wonder and violence. Then, on the morning of All Saints’ Day in 1755, earthquake, fire and sea destroyed much of the city, and Lisbon had to imagine itself again from ruins.
Perhaps cities, like democracies, survive precisely because they can be rebuilt. Rua Augusta itself belongs to that rebuilding. The ordered Baixa through which we walked arose from catastrophe, an Enlightenment answer to destruction: straighten the streets, strengthen the buildings, make a city where a city had fallen. The stones beneath our feet therefore contained an old and useful lesson. What has been damaged need not remain damaged. What has been inherited need not remain unchanged. History gives us ruins, certainly, but it also gives us the human capacity to build differently upon them.
And somewhere inside that immense history was our small family history. More than five centuries ago, our ancestors left this mainland for the Azores, part of those generations who crossed the sea to populate islands rising from the Atlantic. They too must have known something about uncertainty. They too departed toward a future they could not see. Whatever their reasons—land, opportunity, necessity, adventure, survival—they stepped away from the known world and toward another one. Centuries later, other departures would follow, other Atlantic crossings, until our family’s geography eventually stretched from Portugal to the islands and from the islands to America. And now here I was, walking through Lisbon with their descendants: young Americans whose blood carries fragments of journeys they did not make but whose consequences they inhabit.
How strange history can be when contemplated through grandchildren. The ancestors leave looking for a better life. Their descendants leave again looking for a better life. Generations cross oceans believing somewhere beyond the horizon there might be greater possibility. And then, centuries later, on an August afternoon, a grandfather walks beside his grandchildren along an old Lisbon street while those grandchildren speak of making their country better. The circle does not close. It widens.
I thought of Whitman’s immense democratic faith, his conviction that America was not merely territory but an unfinished human possibility, capacious enough to contain contradiction and multitudes. I thought of Baldwin, who understood far more painfully that to love a country is not to flatter it, but to demand that it confront the distance between its mythology and the lives of its people. And somewhere between Whitman’s hope and Baldwin’s necessary fire walked my grandchildren, although I did not tell them this. Some literary references are better kept silently by a grandfather. Young people should not have every beautiful moment annotated for them.
Mostly, I listened. That may have been the gift Lisbon gave me that hot and humid August evening. Grandparents are expected to speak. We are supposed to possess the stories, the warnings, the accumulated little wisdoms of having survived more years. We are supposed to explain where the family came from, what was lost, what was gained, which mistakes should not be repeated. But there comes a time when memory must make room for possibility. The past must sit quietly beside the future and hear what the future has to say.
And my grandchildren had much to say. I discovered things about them that could never have emerged around a dinner table or during the hurried exchanges of ordinary family life. Walking loosens something in us. Cities do too. Perhaps the anonymity of those thousands of strangers around us gave our conversation a kind of intimacy. Nobody knew who we were. Nobody knew that a grandfather was learning his grandchildren again. We were simply three people moving through the great human river of Rua Augusta, beneath balconies and stone, past cafés and shops, toward an arch opening onto a square opening onto a river opening onto the sea.
What advice could I give them? Very little. Fight for what you believe. Do not surrender your capacity for outrage when injustice becomes ordinary. Do not allow comfort to persuade you that someone else’s diminished freedom has nothing to do with yours. Do not confuse prosperity with goodness or stability with justice. Be suspicious of anyone who tells you that belonging to a country requires fearing another human being. And remember that democracy is not inherited like an old family house whose doors will remain standing simply because our grandparents once built them. Every generation must repair the roof. Every generation must strengthen the foundations. Every generation must decide whether there will still be a house for those who come afterward.
And I told them something else, something my generation should perhaps say more often. We did not do as well as we could have. We accomplished things, certainly. We widened freedoms in important ways. We challenged old prejudices. We built lives with a measure of security that many of our parents and grandparents could only imagine. But security has its temptations. Sometimes, while pursuing a little more comfort, a little more prosperity, a little more protection from uncertainty, we learned not to see what demanded to be seen. We turned away from injustices because they did not enter our homes. We postponed difficult reckonings because the economy was good, because life was busy, because there were mortgages and careers and children to raise, because someone else would surely attend to the republic. History is merciless toward the phrase someone else.
Their generation will have to do better. Not because they are purer than we were, nor because youth possesses some automatic moral superiority, but because every generation inherits both the achievements and the evasions of the one before it. We hand them bridges and broken promises, freedoms and inequalities, extraordinary knowledge and terrible weapons, democratic institutions and the evidence of how fragile those institutions can become. The inheritance is mixed. It always has been.
Perhaps that is why Rua Augusta seemed such an appropriate place for this conversation. We were walking through a city made from layers of inheritance: Roman and Moorish, Jewish and Christian, medieval and imperial, ruined and reconstructed, provincial and cosmopolitan, Portuguese and unmistakably of the world. Nothing around us was pure. Everything was accumulation. Everything was survival, transformation, memory.
At last, we passed beneath the arch and Praça do Comércio opened before us with its great expanse of light. And there was the Tagus. The river has always known more about departures than we do. From somewhere along those waters ships once carried people toward islands where our ancestors would build lives. Other ships went farther, toward histories both magnificent and terrible. Centuries later, descendants of those islanders would cross another ocean toward America. And now their grandchildren had returned, not as emigrants or settlers, not seeking land or survival, but as young people carrying questions about justice and freedom through the streets their ancestors might once have known.
I looked at them differently then. Not simply as my grandchildren, though the tenderness of that word is already an entire universe. I saw them as continuations. Not continuations of me—that would be too possessive, and too small—but continuations of the ancient human argument about what kind of world we owe one another.
That argument is older than Lisbon.
And suddenly the thousands of tourists around us no longer seemed like a distraction. They belonged to the scene. Humanity was everywhere: languages crossing languages, faces from continents our ancestors could scarcely have imagined, children running through the square, old couples walking slowly, young people photographing one another beneath the August sun. The old imperial square had become, for an afternoon, an enormous democratic gathering of strangers.
And among them walked a grandfather who had come believing he knew something about where his grandchildren came from and discovered instead that what mattered was where they wanted to go. I had brought them into the old city. They brought me toward the future.
Perhaps this is one of the secret purposes of grandchildren: they return us to history while rescuing us from living entirely inside it. They carry something of our faces and none of our obligation to repeat our lives. They inherit our stories but must write sentences we cannot compose for them. We can tell them where the road began. We cannot decide where it must end. So, we continued walking beside the Tagus, three generations away from some journeys, five centuries away from others, with São Jorge above us and the Atlantic somewhere beyond the river’s widening mouth.
I do not remember how long the conversation lasted. I hope, in some way, it never ends.
For that afternoon on Rua Augusta, amid the architecture and restaurants, souvenir shops and side streets, beneath the arch and beside the river, Lisbon gave me something far more valuable than another encounter with its beauty. It allowed me to meet my grandchildren again—not as children within the shelter of family memory, but as young citizens standing at the threshold of their own moral lives. And I listened. That may be the most important thing I did in Lisbon.
I listened to their doubts. I listened to their anger. I listened to their hope. I listened to the America they fear losing and the America they still believe possible. I listened while beneath our feet lay the ruins and reconstructions of civilizations, while above us stood the old castle, while beside us flowed the river that had carried generations toward uncertain futures.
And walking there, in the capital of the country where I was born, on streets shaped by peoples who had come and gone for more than two thousand years, beside descendants of people who once departed these shores searching for another life, I understood something I had perhaps known but never quite articulated: Inheritance is not what we leave our grandchildren. Inheritance is what they decide is worth carrying forward. The rest belongs to history. And the future—thankfully, beautifully, frighteningly—belongs to them.
Diniz Borges for Filamentos (Photos from Visit Lisbon and Be Poet Hotel)