IN PURSUIT OF PORTUGAL

I SUPPOSE WE SEE the world through the lens of our losses as much as our loves.

When I find myself unexpectedly headed for Lisbon one morning in spring, two months have passed since a fire jumped from my neighbor’s house to mine, wiping out much of our property and displacing my family of four. We’re all OK, but still I hope that Lisbon—which I’ve never seen—will be a balm. And how can it not be, I reassure myself while hurtling over the Atlantic away from the children, who will sleep in our makeshift home without me tonight? Lisbon produced Fernando Pessoa, in whose timeless Book of Disquiet I have been finding consolation for nearly two decades.

I arrive at midday. Through the window of a taxi, I look past the traffic and have the unexpected impression of being transported to the landscape of a richly hued painting whose subject is Iberian imperial glory. It’s not just the massive riverside square with its triumphal arch; it’s the vastness of the sky, the loftiness of the clouds, the hint of dust in the golden light. “And the light falls so serenely and perfectly on things, gilds them with such sad, smiling reality,” Pessoa wrote of his city. I expected something quieter, more diminished, yet everything here appears so proud, strong of scale, and luminous, the stuff of dreams.

And I do seem to be dreaming when, though tired from the journey, I take a walk as soon as I’ve dropped offexiting the place to find another placard, this one seemingly straight out of a dream, its words redirecting me: SALA FERNANDO PESSOA.