Where the Pines Speak to the Sea

 This essay is a companion piece to an earlier reflection. Both explore Lisbon through memory, literature, and landscape, but each approaches the city from a slightly different perspective.​

“Tudo vale a pena se a alma não é pequena.”  
— Fernando Pessoa, Mensagem

Seagulls stood on sand in the middle of the gallery.

Around them, ghosts of dark figures in wide hats sat at a table as if engaged in quiet conversation, their pale faces emerging from deep shadows. Visitors moved slowly through the room, pausing before the paintings as though they had stepped into a dream. Sacred archeological pieces of Pessoa's life were shown in paintings surrounding the setting of a table from Pessoa's favorite restaurant Cafe Martinho on the water front where he met with fellow artists to plan the introduction of Portuguese culture to the rest of the world.

It was 1981, and I was standing in an exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The Portuguese artist António Costa Pinheiro had created the series as a tribute to Fernando Pessoa and the mysterious world of voices he brought to life through his heteronyms.

In the gallery, Pessoa’s universe had been transformed into a kind of theatrical landscape. The figures seemed both familiar and enigmatic—echoes perhaps of Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, or Bernardo Soares. The seagulls standing on sand suggested the harbor and the river, as though Lisbon itself had quietly entered the room.

I did not yet know that this exhibition would open a doorway into Pessoa’s imagination—or that Pessoa himself would eventually lead me to Lisbon.

The artist had lived through the years of the Salazar dictatorship, a time when many Portuguese writers and artists endured imprisonment or exile. When he was finally released, he left Portugal for Paris and later Munich, carrying his country with him through his art. He proved to be a sweet and generous man, willing to correspond and share his thoughts. I was fortunate enough to acquire several of his works, small anchors to a cultural world that was just beginning to reveal itself to me.

Through that exhibition I entered the writings of Fernando Pessoa, and Pessoa, inevitably, led me to Lisbon.

One of the works that affected me most deeply was Pessoa’s small but powerful book of poems, Mensagem. In it he evokes the historical figures who shaped Portugal’s destiny—kings, navigators, dreamers who imagined a nation reaching beyond its shores.

Among them, the figure who stayed with me most strongly was King Dinis.

D. Dinis was known as both the Farmer King and the Poet King. He planted the great pine forests along the Portuguese coast, forests that would later provide timber for the ships of the navigators. But in Pessoa’s poem those pines become something more than a practical enterprise. The wind moving through their branches seems almost to whisper toward the sea, as if the trees themselves were dreaming of voyages yet to come.

The image is simple and haunting: the murmur of the forest becoming the murmur of the ocean.

When I later walked among the pines near Belém, close to the great monastery of Jerónimos where so many explorers once prayed before sailing into the unknown, I suddenly understood the poem in a new way. The scent of resin in the air, the wide river opening toward the Atlantic, the quiet movement of wind through the trees—it felt as though the landscape itself was repeating Pessoa’s lines.

Lisbon is a city where history and imagination mingle easily.

At the Miradouro de Santa Catarina, beneath the brooding stone figure of Adamastor gazing toward the Tagus, the city gathers each evening to watch the light fade over the water. In Chiado, I like to sit quietly toward the back of A Brasileira, imagining Pessoa and his companions among the artists and writers who once gathered there. Along the river in the afternoon, the broad movement of the Tagus seems to carry centuries of departures and returns.

Other writers soon joined Pessoa in guiding my understanding of the city. The elegant social observations of Eça de Queirós, the philosophical depth of José Saramago, and more recently the searching psychological voice of António Lobo Antunes all reveal different facets of Lisbon’s soul. I also discovered inspired lovers of Portugal like the Swiss Pascal Mercier and Italian Antonio Tabucchi whose writing has brought Lisbon to me through philosophical and poetic images in works like Night Train to Lisbon, Requiem, an Hallucination, and Pereira Maintains.
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Together they show that Lisbon is not only a place but a cultural inheritance—one that extends across centuries of poetry, philosophy, and memory.

A line from Night Train to Lisbon has often returned to me: we leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, and there are parts of ourselves we can recover only by going back there.

Perhaps that is why Lisbon never feels entirely distant.

Some part of my life still sits quietly at a café in Chiado. Another part walks along the river in the afternoon light. And somewhere among the pines near Belém, the wind still moves through the branches, carrying that soft murmur Pessoa heard so long ago.

The whisper of the pines calling to the sea.

And when I think back to that gallery in Lisbon in 1981, I realize that the journey had already begun there, among the seagulls and the silent figures gathered around Pessoa’s table.