Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard H. Davis

Portugal gets reduced to a toy diorama: one steep green wedge, one white watchtower, one strip of lemon houses, and a cast of sheep performing circus tricks on a hillside. That compression is the point. Richard H. Davis writes with the brisk confidence of a turn-of-the-century travel correspondent, and his joke lands because it mimics the way a foreign place first appears from a distance: simplified into bold shapes, bright colors, and a handful of moving parts.

The “apparently” is doing quiet work. It signals that the narrator knows he’s being unfair, yet chooses the caricature anyway. That wink turns the description into a critique of perception itself: the traveler’s gaze isn’t neutral; it’s an editing machine, shaving off complexity until a country becomes a postcard. The “one man” who “inhabits” Portugal is less a literal claim than a sly admission that the narrator hasn’t met anyone who counts as fully real in his frame. Humans shrink to an anecdotal prop; animals get the lively verbs. Sheep “do grand acts of balancing,” a line that flatters the landscape’s drama while infantilizing rural life as quaint entertainment.

Context matters: Davis comes out of an era when Anglophone writers sold the world as scenes and sensations, not societies. The watchtower “flying signal flags” nods to empire and maritime surveillance, but it’s decorative here, part of the skyline’s charm. The subtext is the power imbalance of tourism before we had that word: the observer gets to miniaturize a nation, and the nation has to sit still and look picturesque.