"For a few days I pack around another little weight as I walk the streets of Rio. The sudden appearance of my father into my thoughts tend to confuse and complicate my perceptions of Brazil. There is a new connection here that I don't immediately make, which I am not really very interested in making. I have rejected almost all of my past that is not involved with Ecuador and want to feel that my life only began to turn intense and interesting after I had decided in middle-aged to leave my country, to reject if I could my middle-class prejudices, and to be remade by confronting a strange and uncertain culture. I want to feel that if I am now facing a kind of crisis in my life that all its causes will be found in the immediate past. But something strange that I resist is coming to life. When I stroll through the more disreputable parts of town - the wharves, the cheap hotels, bars, and whore houses across from the docks where the steamships lie, I have the funny feeling that I am somehow walking in the footsteps of my father, moving behind him on the rundown tree-shaded streets. I resent the arrival of the uninvited guest, there is nothing left for us to say, and I walk away from him when I spy him ahead of me sadly standing before a monument or coming out of a restaurant. In the day it is easy to channel my thoughts to other things when my father suddenly appears, brought back to life out of the most trivial things."
(Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers)
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