Twas brillig

I’ve been listening to Brazilian music today while I also tried to get some work done. I heard some of the music that I first heard there. When I reheard it today it moved me greatly. This music ‘caught me’ unawares when we lived there and it still does. It entered and took possession of much of my mental world and it is still there.

I think that I connect the effort of learning Portuguese with the strong feelings, visualities, the people, in fact with everything that happened to me (to us) at the time. At the beginning of our stay, I spent eight months in verbal (and social) isolation before I managed to create a conversation with another human being, except for my children. They spoke English to me but they soon gave up that habit up. I only discovered recently (because they never told me) that they they had understood very little of my nightly readings of Charlotte’s Web that I faithfully read to them in English. They learned to speak Portuguese far sooner than I. I think that we were all changed by that experience.

The ‘community of people that we lived amongst was, in comparison to other places, a very close and often a warm mental space. I was expected to rely on a ‘library’ of intuitive impulses that in a sense I’d never learned in childhood. So frequently I found myself unsure of what to do or say. My lasting experience is a sort of sweet sorrow or saudade.