Time and Complaint

And this unbearable heat? These Minho and Beira roots, a certain Anglophile maturity or the melancholy of the tie all contribute to my tendency to prefer the cold. Or Winter, as the months from November to March were once called.

Sometime in April, I found myself in a health facility:

— “Don’t worry, you can move around freely from 10:00 onwards,” says the young healthcare professional.

— “Yes. I even got caught in a heavy downpour.”

— “I see, I see! Today, time is incomprehensible.”

Silence.

— “You see…”, suspension and — “…April, a thousand waters!”, I conclude, very pleased to draw on the popular cliché to justify reservations in relation to the unanimities that feed social alarmism.

— “That’s true too. But last year, at this time, I was already at the beach. It wasn’t that the sun was out in the summer, but I could have gone for a swim,” the girl was completely unaware of the ridiculousness of her own memory. There’s no shame in showing off summer enthusiasm in the middle of April.

But that is not a problem. Because the big issue that this little elevator exchange of ideas hides is not so much the great human fear that everything, even the weather, is a symptom of an imminent collapse. It is the magnetism that the beach exerts on the Lisbonite. The problem is not the weather being like this or like that: at the first ray of sunshine there goes the Lisbonite, in Ray-Bans and Paez, towards the golden splendor of the nearby sands. It is this beach abyss that justifies their eco-anxious melancholy. When the geographical charm that we were given in the raffle should, on the contrary, motivate the most lively and profound gratitude.

I had not yet had the opportunity to confess, in public, this meteorological distrust that had been growing in my head. Indistinguishable, today, from the sebaceous cysts that live there. There has been no shortage of opportunities. Because everything, absolutely everything, my friends, fits into this immense and vague framework that someone has baptized “climate change”.

When Al Gore decided to relaunch his political career as a prophet of doom, they called it “global warming.” And I, who already had a disdain for almost all collective enthusiasms, simply watched. As the predictions failed and the weather didn’t get that warm, a few people opened their eyes to the obvious. The term was short, commonplace, unworthy of so much panic, and they updated it. Rebranding , as the snake oil salesmen would say. And it became known as “climate change.” A useful and efficient jargon that includes cold, heat, drought and flood. Everything and nothing.

Has it cooled down? Is it warmer after all? A hurricane in South America? Sunstroke in the Algarve? Before, there were more beautiful and less exalted titles for these variations. They were the seasons.

They were divided into four and written with a capital letter. They so aroused man's ingenuity that Vivaldi composed his Magnum Opus. It was even on account of these four wonders of natural diversity that a certain pizza chef, somewhere in the 19th century, decided to divide ingredients according to their season on top of a piece of dough. If that's not funny, nothing is.

Here’s what I mean: the poetry of names has an intimate relationship with the poetry of things. It’s hard to imagine a chef who would dare to create a “Climate Change Feijoada.” Nor a composer who would dare to write a symphony with that miserable title.

Regarding the pathetic heat of the last few days, which is being passed off as a premonition of the Apocalypse, someone sent me one of those “before and after” montages. Side by side, two infographics: one from the 90s, the other from today. In the older one, emoji-like suns dotted a light green map of the Iberian Peninsula. A good sense of humor in Paintbrush . In the more recent one, sinister stains of various hues that ranged from lava-red to Dracula-red turned the Peninsula into a throbbing Mordor. It was as if God had decided, once and for all, to set the whole thing on fire.

I believe that the point is yet another, more obscure, as old as our fallen nature. Here it is: we are only good at saying bad things. Why did the poor health assistant who accompanied me in the elevator to the second floor of the hospital complain? It wasn't so much about the lack of beach in April as because. This is what people have been doing since the Garden of Eden was denied to us. They complain. Because complaining is essential to persevering, in this valley of shadows we call life. Because it reminds us, even if vaguely, deep down, that there was once something better. Something good.

“Climate change,” like sciatica, inflation, my sebaceous cysts, etc., etc., is an escape valve. We tend to talk about the weather, true. As we tend to complain. Waiting for another season. What was lost.

Manuel Fúria is a musician and lives in Lisbon. Manuel Barbosa de Matos is his real name.

The texts in this section reflect the personal opinions of the authors. They do not represent VISÃO nor do they reflect its editorial position.