SS_05/14 → Notes from Conversas Vadias #5 – Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Baptista Bastos
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Baptista Bastos
Originally broadcast by RTP on 5 April 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.
There are people who spend their lives looking backwards.
Others spend them trying to preserve the present.
Agostinho seemed interested in neither.
Early in the conversation, he says something I haven’t forgotten since I first heard it.
I only miss the future.
At first, it sounds like poetry.
Then you realise it’s a completely different way of living.
Most nostalgia points backwards.
His points forwards.
Not because the future is guaranteed.
But because possibility is more interesting than memory.
That idea quietly shapes everything else he says.
He has little patience for theory detached from reality.
Politics, he reminds us, comes from the polis.
The city.
Which means politics should be about making life happen.
Not simply describing it.
He contrasts writing with doing.
Ideas matter.
But only if they eventually become reality.
Otherwise they remain decoration.
That distinction feels increasingly relevant.
We live in an age of endless commentary.
Everyone has an opinion.
Everyone has a platform.
Everyone explains.
Far fewer people build.
Agostinho never dismisses thought.
He simply refuses to stop there.
Perhaps that’s why he admired the Portuguese Discoveries.
Not because ships crossed oceans.
But because someone eventually left the harbour.
Action is what transforms imagination into history.
Another sentence from the conversation stayed with me.
The mind doesn’t produce ideas.
It detects them.
Whether you interpret that spiritually, philosophically or scientifically almost doesn’t matter.
The invitation is the same.
Stop trying so hard to manufacture everything.
Pay attention.
Listen.
Observe.
Allow ideas to arrive before trying to control them.
Towards the end, he says something that feels almost impossible today.
Sometimes, students shouldn’t think so much.
They should become quiet enough to hear what he calls the voice of the goddess.
It’s a strange expression.
Until you realise he isn’t advocating ignorance.
He’s questioning noise.
We spend so much time filling our minds that we leave very little room for anything unexpected to enter.
Maybe creativity isn’t always about producing.
Maybe it’s also about receiving.
And perhaps that’s why Agostinho only missed the future.
Because that’s where the next unexpected idea was still waiting.
Original source
Conversas Vadias — Episode 5 → https://www.fernandomoreira.me/conversas-vadias-episodio-5-com-baptista-bastos/
Agostinho da Silva in conversation with Baptista Bastos.
Broadcast by RTP on 5 April 1990.
Available through the RTP Archives.