Rio, Three Ways: Beach, Book, and Breath
We are live—two voices, two continents, one thread. Frank calls in from a quiet village in the northeast of France; Isma answers from Brazil, still dusted with the salt and sunlight of a week in Rio. No carnival feathers here, no samba clichés. This is a conversation about cathedrals that smell faintly of wax and time, libraries where the air vibrates with paper memory, and a sandy icon—Copacabana—caught empty in the lens like a held breath.
Frank wants to talk about architecture and meaning. Isma, who joined a university trip of forty people on a 24-hour bus ride to the coast, wants to talk about travel as inner work: how a city can change you—even when you don’t notice in the moment. You can almost hear their coffee cups settle as the call begins. What happens when we visit a place for its famous beach, and leave with an unexpected tenderness for its shelves and stones?
Isma’s Rio was not the postcard; it was the palimpsest. He moved through the city largely alone—by choice and by temperament—keeping company with façades and dates and the hush of old rooms. The group he traveled with skewed young, early-twenties teacher-candidates in languages and literature, escorted by three professors and a 71-year-old guide who knew Rio’s folds like a well-read map. “I’m not very social,” Isma says, not apologizing. “I observe.”
He began with churches:
- Igreja de Nossa Senhora de Montserrat—“built in 1633,” Isma notes, “Baroque and, maybe, the most interesting of those I visited.” The photos he sent Frank show a sanctuary layered in gold and shadow, the kind of space that teaches your voice to whisper.
- Mosteiro de São Bento—where a monk named Marlo spoke with the calm of a century’s worth of candles. From the high parts of the monastery you can see the new: the sinuous Tomorrow Museum by the water, a futuristic arc that looks like the city is imagining itself forward while its bells keep time.
- Narrow colonial streets—so slender that a single car must negotiate the passage alone. You feel the city’s age in the geometry of its streets, its scale set before the automobile, before the crush.
If the churches were a grammar of faith, the libraries were a grammar of nationhood.
At the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura—a jeweled room where the light lands on color and leather—there was no guide that day, only the quiet permission to look. “It’s one of the ten most interesting libraries in the world, some say,” Isma offers, then shrugs the claim away; he prefers what he can feel for himself. You can’t borrow the books—too old, too precious—but you can sit beneath them and remember that culture grows by slow accumulation, like stalactites of knowledge.
Then the Biblioteca Nacional—vaster, more procedural, a keeper of Brazil’s legal deposit, where every book published must eventually arrive and receive its ISBN. Bureaucracy as memory. The building opened in 1910, an era when architecture still dared to be ceremonial about the public good. “It was a big idea,” Isma says simply. “Expensive, but valuable.”
If churches make you small to make you spacious, libraries make you quiet to make you curious. What happens to a country that forgets these rituals?
Where do you go—physically or mentally—when you need to remember that you’re part of something larger than your to-do list?
Frank doesn’t let the romance of the itinerary float away untested. He asks about the human texture: what it was like to travel with students who often preferred the beach, the selfie, the feed. “People are people,” Isma says with a gentle shrug, but the conversation circles back to a deeper ache: What is the point of culture if we can’t translate it into a life?
One student dismissed the grand Theatro Municipal of Rio—marble, gilt, an opera house built when cities wrote love letters to art—as “futile,” evidence of politicians who don’t know how to spend public money. She preferred the newer Museum of Afro-Brazilian Culture, a statement of identity and repair. Another confessed she’d rather sunbathe than stand before statues. Neither view is wrong, Frank and Isma agree. But how do we carry both truths—the need to honor historical opulence and the urgency to correct historical silence—without letting one cancel the other?
“Knowledge is useless until you can use it,” Frank says. Isma agrees—and then complicates the line. Maybe usefulness isn’t always practical. Maybe “use” could mean becoming the kind of person who asks better questions, or who can hold two contradictory feelings—pride and discomfort—in the same palm without dropping either. In Rio, you can see a ceiling carved by artisans and, fifteen minutes later, a hillside of unplastered homes. If you leave with anything, let it be a stronger heart.
When was the last time you noticed your own resistance and stayed with it long enough to learn what it was protecting?
Isma’s clearest lesson is disarmingly ordinary: courage is a subway map. He watched grown adults freeze in stations, paralyzed by the novelty of turnstiles and transfers. Leadership, here, was simply the willingness to ask a question, to request directions in a city of strangers. “Not knowing isn’t the problem,” Frank adds. “Not wanting to learn might be.” The line lands, tidy as a ticket stub.
There was also sweetness. At Confeitaria Colombo, a late-19th-century salon of mirrors imported from Belgium, the manager came out to play historian. Twenty-four years on the job; two hours’ worth of stories in ten gracious minutes. Isma returned on his own, twice, but the queue was long. He stood in line at another old café that had cameoed in an Oscar-winning Brazilian film; after the movie, the customer flow rose, and he wanted to see the place that narrative had touched. This is how culture really works—not in decrees, but in lines and cravings, in the way fiction moves feet.
You don’t need to be “into opera” or “into pastries” to feel the pull of a room that’s seen more than you have. You only need to step inside and let your senses brief you.
Frank keeps coaxing the conversation toward a practical outcome. If travel is “the only expense that makes you richer,” as Ismar recalls reading, how exactly are we richer? The answers the two men circle are not ledger-friendly: comparative insight (the Theatro Municipal in São Paulo vs. Rio), a denser weave of references, the humility that comes from walking through rooms where decisions—good and terrible—were once made. Ismar doesn’t claim superiority over his mother, who has seen less of Rio; he claims only a different set of images to draw from when life asks for context.
Maybe the real use of knowledge is delayed. Can you allow yourself to learn for later—trusting that meaning often arrives out of sequence?
A city between beach and book
Frank tries on a thought experiment. If he flew to Rio, he’d do three things: visit Copacabana because it’s what tourists do; spend time in the Municipal Theater because buildings tell stories; and talk to people in a favela because truth requires unvarnished company. Would he fly home richer? “In a practical way,” Ismar says, “maybe nothing.” Pause. “But in your mind—yes.” That yes is not smug; it’s steady. It’s a belief that enlarging your repertoire of realities makes you more humanly responsive, even if it doesn’t make you more professionally efficient by Monday.
There’s a tenderness in the way the two of them disagree. Frank says education’s purpose is hard to explain because its dividends are probabilistic: you don’t know when you’ll need what you’re learning. Ismar worries that too many students leave guided tours without asking a single question. Frank counters: perhaps the guide’s highest function is not to answer but to ignite—so that the real inquiry starts later, in the library or online or over coffee with a friend. In a culture organized around immediate utility, both men are arguing for a slower metabolism of meaning.
What if the value of a trip—or a book or a conversation—is measured not by what you can quote the next day, but by what you reach for five years from now?
Safety, luck, and the quiet bravery of going anyway
Isma had avoided Rio for 31 years after his last visit in 1994, spooked by the headlines. This time he returned carefully, alert to pickpockets, wise to the choreography of wallet and phone. He came home safe, and grateful. The acknowledgment isn’t naive; it’s seasoned. “Some places are more violent than others,” he says. “But if you are lucky, it’s possible to go and come back safely.” The luck is never distributed fairly. The going matters anyway.
On the bus back, he felt a small grief for the students who seemed unmoved by gilded ceilings, and a small joy for those who will probably write a dissertation or a novel someday, drawing from this week like a well. Maybe they just didn’t show it yet. “We’re the sum of everything we’ve lived,” he says. “They may have taken more than I did. I can’t know.”
The humility is the point. Rio didn’t hand him a manifesto; it slid a few new tiles into the mosaic of his mind. He now holds a more textured sense of what a library means in a country where every book must report for duty, of how an opera house can be both an inheritance and a provocation, of how a beach can be empty and still famous. He watched young travelers photograph themselves beside statues and thought: normal. He watched some freeze in the metro and thought: learnable. He watched a manager in a pastry palace tell stories and thought: pride can be a profession.
If pride is contagious, who did you catch it from last—and whom might you pass it to next?
The call winds down with an unsolved question: How do we show the next generation why any of this matters? Frank suggests that the answer might be less about “convincing” and more about curating experiences that make meaning feel personal: the right doorway at the right hour; the right bench in the right reading room; the right guide whose sentence hooks into a student’s curiosity and doesn’t let go. In other words, we seed summers.
“Creating our own summer,” Frank says, “even in winter.” A season that isn’t on the calendar so much as in the chest: warmth as a practice. You make it by choosing where to look, whom to listen to, how long to stay. You make it by holding the city in threes—beach, book, and breath—so that no single story gets to stand for the whole. And then, you go home richer in the only way that matters: with more light to lend.
What would be your three points of any city—the iconic, the institutional, the intimate? And what season are you making, right now, with your attention?
