SS_06/14 → Notes from Conversas Vadias #6 – Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Alice Cruz
Notes from Conversas Vadias #6
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Alice Cruz
Originally broadcast by RTP on 12 April 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.
Some words become so familiar that we stop noticing the difference between them.
Acceptance.
Tolerance.
We often use them as if they meant exactly the same thing.
Agostinho didn’t.
In one of the simplest moments of the conversation, he quietly separates the two.
To accept is to take something into yourself.
To tolerate is merely to allow it.
It sounds like semantics.
It isn’t.
Tolerance still creates distance.
“I disagree with you, but I’ll let you exist.”
Acceptance dissolves that separation.
It doesn’t necessarily mean agreement.
It means reality no longer needs your permission to be what it already is.
That distinction stayed with me.
Perhaps because we live in a world obsessed with judging.
Everything must immediately become good or bad.
Success or failure.
Right or wrong.
Useful or useless.
Agostinho rarely seems interested in those categories.
Earlier in the conversation, he says something equally revealing.
People don’t have virtues and flaws.
They have characteristics.
The difference is enormous.
A characteristic simply exists.
The label comes afterwards.
The same trait that ruins one person’s life may allow another to build something extraordinary.
Reality comes first.
Judgement comes later.
If at all.
Another moment caught my attention.
Someone asks him about destiny.
His answer isn’t certainty.
It never is.
Perhaps destiny exists.
Perhaps it doesn’t.
What matters is something else.
Looking back, every obstacle that appeared in his own life ended up helping him.
Not because suffering is inherently good.
But because reality often reveals its meaning only in retrospect.
There’s something deeply calming about that perspective.
We spend enormous energy trying to eliminate uncertainty.
Agostinho seems to suggest another approach.
Remain calm enough for life to reveal what you cannot yet understand.
Towards the end of the conversation, he speaks about poetry.
Not as literature.
Not as a profession.
As a way of existing.
He says he never worked at poetry.
Sometimes a poem simply arrived.
He wrote it down.
Then he goes one step further.
Perhaps our entire life is poetry.
If that’s true, then creativity isn’t something reserved for artists.
It’s something expressed through the way we live.
The way we relate.
The way we serve.
The way we pay attention.
Perhaps the real work isn’t becoming someone else.
It’s becoming available enough for life to write through us.
Original source
Conversas Vadias — Episode 6 → https://www.fernandomoreira.me/conversas-vadias-episodio-6-com-alice-cruz/
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Alice Cruz.
Broadcast by RTP on 12 April 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.