As a child, I once asked my mother a question that puzzled me.

“When people look at me, do they see what I see when I look in the mirror?”

I don’t remember her answer. What I remember is the question. Somehow, even then, I sensed there was a difference between the person in the mirror and the person I experienced from within.

Today, we live surrounded by our own reflections.

We see ourselves in mirrors, photographs, video calls, security cameras, and social media. Never before have we been presented with so many opportunities to look at ourselves. Yet I sometimes wonder whether all this looking has brought us any closer to knowing who we are.

A recent newspaper essay suggested that constant exposure to our own image may actually distance us from ourselves. We become preoccupied with the person we present rather than the person we are. We begin to confuse the image with the life.

It reminded me of José Saramago and Fernando Pessoa, two writers who have quietly accompanied me for many years.

Pessoa understood that we are never only one person. Through his many literary voices, he explored the shifting, contradictory nature of identity. No mirror could contain that complexity.

Saramago, in his own way, questioned appearances just as deeply. Again and again, he asked whether we truly see reality or merely the images we create to replace it.

Their questions have stayed with me, but so has my own.

Is that really me?

The older I become, the more I think the answer is both yes and no.

A photograph records a face. A mirror reflects an instant. A video captures gestures and expressions. They are all real, but they are not the whole person.

The self we seek does not live in a reflection.

It reveals itself more quietly—in conversations that change us, in books that awaken us, in music that moves us, in cities we wander, in friendships that endure, and in those unexpected moments when something in the world suddenly feels familiar before we understand why.

Looking back over my own life, I realize I have discovered far more about myself by the gift of paying attention than by paying attention to my image.

Perhaps that is why curiosity has always mattered so much to me.

The gift of paying attention turns us outward. It asks us to listen before speaking, to observe before judging, to wonder before concluding. And somehow, by looking beyond ourselves, we begin to understand ourselves more deeply.

When I now see an old photograph and find myself wondering, Is that really me? I smile.

Don’t get too excited.

It isn’t.

The person I’m looking for has never lived in a mirror or a photograph.

She is still being discovered.

The you you seek is elsewhere.

Yesterday I watched two films recommended by my daughter.

She had discovered them on TAP while returning from a swimming adventure in the Azores and thought I would like them. I found them on Amazon Prime and bought them, as I generally do when I suspect a film might warrant a second viewing.

I had no idea they belonged together.

The first was a documentary about a young woman, an old boat, and two friends who set out across the North Atlantic for the Azores. Before the journey could even begin, they spent a year bringing the boat back to life. Then came thirty days at sea—beautiful, strenuous, sometimes frightening, and filled with the particular happiness that seems to come from choosing an adventure whose outcome you cannot entirely control.

The second film could hardly have seemed more different.

It was Brazilian, and at first I wondered whether it might be too dark for me. In the world of the film, the government has decided that citizens over seventy-five should be removed from ordinary life and sent to a compound where they will be cared for. The justification is chillingly practical: younger people should be freed from responsibility for the elderly so they can work and produce.

One woman isn’t having it.

What follows is another kind of adventure—a journey toward freedom through a world of water, extraordinary foliage, unexpected people, and lives being lived somewhere beyond the boundaries society has drawn for them.

Only after watching the two films back to back did I realize what my daughter had given me.

One story was about a young woman setting out into the unknown because she could.

The other was about an older woman setting out into the unknown because someone had told her she couldn’t.

And both found freedom on the water.

My daughter had just returned from swimming in the Azores. I was sitting at home watching the films she had discovered somewhere over the Atlantic.

Two women. Two boats. Two very different moments in life.

And somehow, for one afternoon, it felt like my daughter’s soul and mine were traveling together.

I wrote earlier about entering Dante through a side door—a film that led me toward a poem I had long hesitated to approach. I didn’t know then how far that door would open.

Recently I found myself thinking about something I had never quite put into words:

Time can become spacious rather than merely plentiful.

There is a difference.

Plentiful time can still be filled—with appointments, obligations, things to accomplish. Spacious time has room in it. Room to wander down a street simply because you haven’t walked there in years. Room to sit over a coffee. Room to read one canto of Dante and then spend an hour wondering about something you found there.
Perhaps that is what curiosity requires.
Not long ago, I watched Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante. It sent me to Nick Tosches’s novel, which in turn has sent me back to Dante’s Divine Comedy with an entirely different understanding of what I am reading.
The three have begun to speak to one another.

Tosches helps me see the man behind the Inferno: Dante in exile, his world disrupted, trying to make sense of disorder by imagining a universe in which everything has its place and its consequence. Schnabel takes Tosches’s unruly meditation on Dante and makes something different from it again. And then I return to Dante and notice things I might otherwise have passed by.

There is no particular destination in all this. I don’t need to finish the Divine Comedy by a certain date. I can read a canto, follow a reference, return to Tosches, watch Schnabel again, and see where the conversation takes me.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have done that at another time in my life. There were too many things that needed doing.

Now I have discovered the pleasure of spacious time.

It allows one thing to lead to another. A film to a novel. A novel to a seven-hundred-year-old poem. A morning walk to a house that unexpectedly brings back someone you knew long ago.

None of these connections needs to lead anywhere useful.

It is enough to notice them.

Curiosity needs spacious time.

And perhaps the invitation is simply this: when something catches your attention, don’t hurry past it.

See where it takes you

I have often wondered how one approaches Dante. Not simply how one reads him, but how one enters his world.

Surprisingly, I found my doorway not in a book, but in a film.

Recently I watched Julian Schnabel’s In The Hand of Dante. It is one of those rare films that demands a second viewing—not because it is confusing, but because it is so rich. Each time I watched, another layer revealed itself.

Only later did I discover that Schnabel’s film was itself based on Nick Tosches’s novel In the Hand of Dante. It seemed fitting. Even my path to Dante had taken a winding route.

Until then, I knew remarkably little about Dante himself. My interests had led me in neighboring directions. I had spent time reading about fourteenth-century Florence, the rise of the city-states, and later the Medici family. Like many people, I suppose I knew that Dante loved Beatrice. But beyond that, his political life, his exile, and the profound spiritual journey that gave birth to The Divine Comedy remained largely unknown to me.

Schnabel’s film invited me in through a side door.

Rather than presenting Dante as a distant literary monument, he brought him startlingly to life. The story moves effortlessly between medieval Italy and the modern world, with the same actors inhabiting both centuries. Past and present seem to echo one another until the boundaries begin to dissolve. The effect is mesmerizing. The passions, betrayals, ambitions, and longings of the thirteenth century suddenly feel very familiar. Human nature, it seems, has changed very little.

By the time the credits rolled, I knew I had to read Dante’s masterpiece for myself.

When the volume arrived, however, I confess I was startled. Ninety-nine cantos spread across more than nine hundred pages. I realized immediately that this was not a book to hurry through. It was an invitation to travel slowly.

So I made a quiet promise to myself: one canto each evening.

Even with the remarkable guidance of translators and commentators, The Divine Comedy asks for patience. Dante assumes his readers know the history, politics, philosophy, and theology of his age. More than once I have found myself stopping to look up a forgotten figure or untangle an ancient dispute before continuing on my way. Far from being frustrating, I have come to see this as part of the journey itself. Dante is not simply telling a story; he is inviting us to enter an entire world.

At the moment I am still making my way through Inferno. It is not easy reading, nor should it be. Dante asks us to look unflinchingly at pride, greed, betrayal, violence, and despair—not only in others, but in ourselves. Hell is a place where every soul has surrendered hope. That, perhaps more than the punishments themselves, is what makes it so haunting.

Yet everyone assures me that the climb grows brighter.

Beyond Hell lies Purgatory, where hope returns. Souls still struggle, but they struggle with purpose. They are moving toward something better. That promise alone has been enough to keep me turning the pages.

As I read, I realize that Dante’s great poem is about much more than the afterlife. It is about being human. We all wander into dark forests from time to time, uncertain of the path ahead. We all encounter fears that seem larger than ourselves. The difference is that, unlike the souls Dante leaves behind in Hell, we are free to keep walking.
Perhaps that is the enduring gift of The Divine Comedy. It reminds us that hope is not the certainty that everything will turn out as we wish. Hope is what allows us to take the next step before we know where the road will lead.

Sometimes all we need is a doorway.

Mine happened to be a film.

That doorway turned out to lead farther than I expected. After reading Nick Tosches’s novel and returning again to Dante, I began thinking about what makes these unexpected journeys possible. I continue that thought in Curiosity Needs Spacious Time.

​At about the same time I first encountered Hopper, I also discovered Fernando Pessoa. Soon afterward came Pirandello, de Chirico, and other writers and artists whose work seemed strangely familiar. I admired them deeply but could never quite explain why.

Looking back now, I think they were all speaking the same language.

Not a language of certainty.

A language of searching.

For years I believed I was collecting books, paintings, and music. I thought I was discovering artists.

Now I think something quite different was happening.

I was discovering companions.

When I first stood before Hopper’s Nighthawks, I was searching for answers I could not yet put into words. Pessoa was asking questions about identity. Pirandello wondered who we become when we imagine becoming someone else. Hopper painted ordinary people whose inner lives remained hidden. Each seemed to be circling the same mystery.

Yet none of them tried to explain it.

Hopper never explained the loneliness in Nighthawks. He simply painted it.

Pessoa never resolved his contradictions. He lived among them.

Pirandello questioned identity without pretending it could be neatly defined.

None of them offered answers.

Instead, they quietly said,

“I’ve wandered through this country too.”

At the time, I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear that.

The years passed. Life changed. I traveled. I walked the streets of Lisbon where Pessoa had walked. I sat in cafés. I listened to jazz in Puerto Vallarta. I discovered Saramago, António Lobo Antunes, Andrés Neuman, Dante, and many others. Along the way I was fortunate to meet my dear friend Darrel, who became the first flesh-and-blood companion in this growing conversation. Like the writers I admired, he never tried to tell me what to think. He simply shared the joy of paying attention.

Looking back, I can see that Hopper, Pessoa, Darrel, and the others did not lead me out of loneliness. They did something gentler than that.

They walked beside me until I found my own way.

Today, when I stand before Nighthawks or open a book by Pessoa, I no longer see only the questions that first drew
me to them. I also see the companions they became. They met me where I was and remained with me as I changed.

Perhaps that is the greatest gift art can offer.

Not instruction.

Not certainty.

Companionship.

We do not all ask the same questions, nor do we encounter them at the same moments in our lives. Yet every so often
a painting, a novel, a piece of music, or an unexpected conversation stays with us long after we have forgotten where
​we first found it. Something in it recognizes us before we fully recognize ourselves.

It offers no explanation and makes no promises.

It simply keeps us company until we are ready to continue on our own.

Sometimes that is enough.

Not because it answers our questions, but because it reminds us that we do not have to ask them alone.

When I began writing these essays, I thought I was sharing memories of books, music, travel, and art.

Now I think I was doing something else.

I was introducing the companions who quietly shaped the way I came to see the world.

Every so often I encounter a writer who changes not simply what I read, but how I read.

This spring I discovered the Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes. I began with The Inquisitors’ Manual and then The Land at the End of the World. I finished both with the feeling that I had traveled somewhere entirely new—not to another country, but into another way of seeing the human mind.

At first, I wasn’t sure I knew how to read him.

The voices shifted without warning. Time folded back upon itself. Memories interrupted the present. One person’s thoughts merged into another’s until I sometimes wondered if I had lost my way.

But I hadn’t.

I simply had to learn a different kind of reading.

Most novels lead us by the hand from one event to the next. Lobo Antunes asks us to trust that meaning will emerge, not from chronology, but from consciousness itself. Gradually I realized that his novels are not difficult for the sake of being difficult. They unfold much as the mind itself unfolds. We do not remember our lives in neat chapters. A familiar smell recalls childhood. A single sentence returns us to a love long gone. Yesterday and forty years ago can occupy the same instant.

His writing feels astonishingly true to that experience.

People often point out that Lobo Antunes was both a psychiatrist and a military doctor during Portugal’s colonial war in Angola. Those experiences undoubtedly deepened his understanding of trauma and memory. Yet I don’t think they explain the extraordinary power of his novels.

Many psychiatrists have written books. Many soldiers have written about war.

Very few have possessed his remarkable ability to inhabit other minds without judging them.

That, to me, is his great gift.

His characters are neither heroes nor villains. They are simply human beings carrying memories, disappointments, loves, fears, regrets, and hopes. He asks us neither to condemn nor to excuse them, but to understand them. Reading him, I often felt that I was listening to people whose inner lives had finally been allowed to speak without interruption.

There is great compassion in that.

As I have continued reading Portuguese literature, I have come to appreciate how differently each writer approaches the mystery of being human. Fernando Pessoa revealed the many voices that can exist within a single self. José Saramago examined the stories societies tell themselves. Lobo Antunes enters the hidden chambers of memory itself, where those voices and stories are transformed into lived experience.

His novels require patience.

It is easy to become temporarily lost.

But perhaps that is precisely the point.

Walking through the narrow streets of Lisbon, one quickly learns that not every turn leads directly to the destination. Sometimes the most memorable discoveries are found because we wandered a little longer than planned.

Reading Lobo Antunes feels much the same.

You don’t read him simply to find out what happens next.

You read him to discover how a human being remembers.

And somewhere along the way, almost without noticing, you begin to recognize your own mind in the echoes of another.

That is a rare achievement.

It is also why António Lobo Antunes has found a place in my Salon of Curiosity.