SS_03/14 → Notes from Conversas Vadias #3 – Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Joaquim Letria
Notes from Conversas Vadias #3
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Joaquim Letria
Originally broadcast by RTP on 22 March 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.
Some ideas sound poetic.
Others quietly dismantle everything.
This episode is full of the second kind.
One sentence, in particular, refused to leave me.
One of the worst possessions is the possession of oneself.
At first, I didn’t understand it.
How could owning yourself possibly be a bad thing?
Isn’t that what we’re all trying to achieve?
The more I thought about it, the more I realised Agostinho wasn’t talking about freedom.
He was talking about identity.
The stories we become attached to.
“I am this.”
“I am not that.”
“This is who I am.”
The moment we define ourselves too tightly…
…we stop changing.
We start defending an image instead of discovering a person.
Perhaps that’s why he makes another distinction that feels increasingly important.
Education is not the same as instruction.
Instruction builds.
Education leads.
Modern education often assumes the student is something to be constructed.
Agostinho seems to suggest the opposite.
Perhaps the person is already there.
The task isn’t to build them.
It’s to avoid getting in the way.
That idea returns throughout the conversation.
Children should certainly learn a profession.
But they should also preserve the ability to create something nobody has ever created before.
He describes it beautifully.
We need to become both soldiers…
…and poets.
Soldiers because society still demands discipline.
Poets because reality keeps asking for imagination.
Most systems seem to reward one and slowly eliminate the other.
Towards the end of the conversation, Agostinho says something I found unexpectedly liberating.
The future isn’t something we know.
It’s simply the best version we can currently imagine.
Nothing guarantees that reality will follow.
In fact, he almost hopes it doesn’t.
Because the most interesting future would be one we couldn’t possibly predict today.
Perhaps that’s the point.
The future isn’t something to control.
It’s something to remain available for.
Maybe that’s why certainty has always felt like such a fragile strategy.
The moment we become convinced we’ve understood the world…
…the world quietly changes again.
Original source
Conversas Vadias — Episode 3 → https://www.fernandomoreira.me/conversas-vadias-episodio-3-com-joaquim-letria/
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Joaquim Letria.
Broadcast by RTP on 22 March 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.