Understanding the Word Legacy, an Attempt #47 #cong24 #legacy

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1. What is a Legacy?
2.  What are some examples of legacies?
3. Does Legacy matter?
4. I should not invest in a future as a writer

Half Portuguese, Half Thai.
I have travelled quite a bit but not enough.
I have done a bit of everything workwise. I have been a business developer, a bartender, a touring musician, a translator.
I am always looking to learn something new, be it a language, a recipe, a culture or a country.

You can connect with Miguel via email

By Miguel Menano

I would like to start by thanking my good friend David for inviting me to this marvelous event, however, I was not expecting to do much more than to simply enjoy the beautiful Irish sights and people while drinking adult amounts of good Irish spirit so this came as a bit of a surprise to me at first.

Now, since I am not a particularly academically inclined person, nor am I someone wishing to make others think so, I shall try to keep this text quite simple and short. On the subject of legacy, I have found it best for me to start by trying to define the word, however not wanting to fall under the cliché of simply looking it up on a dictionary and calling it a day, I actually took a risk and decided to think.

I began by realising that there is not much in life that does not have a legacy, individual people, groups of people, cultures, countries, companies, brands, bands, even football clubs and dishes. However, I noticed that the legacy of practically any entity can and most likely will contain different points of view. In my home country of Portugal, we are taught that the “Great Age of Discovery” that we started allowed western civilisation to expand its knowledge in the fields of science, biology, geography, technology, cartography amongst others, while also opening up the world and creating important maritime routes and commercial relations that would help usher in the modern age, we currently live in. While it is true that the military aspect of occupation and conquest of foreign lands and peoples is also discussed, it is done so swiftly in a confusingly patriotic yet also trivial manner, in a “we had to fight off savages with bows and arrows so that we could then share our culture and civilise them” kind of way. Curiously, we seem to try so hard to underplay the negative aspects of our colonial empire as a whole yet we normally define the starting date of the “Age of Discovery” as 1415, the year in which we conquered Ceuta in Northern Africa, a city settled in the western world in the 1st millennium BCE. To think of the number of peoples, histories, cultures and countries that have been enslaved, defiled if not entirely erased by Portugal and then by other countries that soon followed our example like Spain, France, the Netherlands, and of course England can be a quite sobering and depressing exercise. However, while one side of this story definitely looks better than the other, both are true, both happened and both are part of the legacy of Portugal.

On a less serious but nonetheless very controversial example, we have the legacy of Italian cuisine. World famous and adored by many all around the globe, Italian cuisine’s most beloved dishes such as pizza and spaghetti in its many forms have been bastardised so much to the point of confusing, enraging and disgusting the citizens of Italy. The addition of certain ingredients such as pineapple or chicken to pizza, giant meatballs to spaghetti or cream to a carbonara sauce are the consequences of generations of Italian migration throughout the world, unequal availability of ingredients, and at times sheer morbid curiosity of experimentation. What most of the world will see as being Italian cuisine can at best be considered Italian-adjacent, and while it can be quite funny to annoy one’s Italian friends by asking if certain ingredients could be added to any of their traditional dishes only to then revel in the outrage of their answer, it is interesting to take a deeper dive into the steadfastness with which Italy’s sons and daughters defend the integrity and limits of their gastronomy. The idea that Italian recipes are something untouched since their respective creation and to remain so until the end of time while quite stereotypical is also just wrong. While officially quite young, Italy is culturally many millenniums old and its cuisine is no different, so how could a gastronomy be historically close-minded and yet have ingredients that were only available from the Age of Discovery onward become so important to it? I am obviously referring to the potato and the tomato, both ingredients that originally come from the Americas and can be found today in many recipes in every region of Italy. So, is the legacy of Italian cuisine one of acceptance of change or resolute permanence? Again, it might be paradoxically a bit of both.

Looking back at the cases I have just mentioned and thinking of others as well, I notice that a legacy is a changing thing, depending on who is viewing it, their individual values through which they may analyse it, as well as those of the society they live in, all of which can transform in time. The good today can be bad tomorrow and ugly the day after. Not only that, but one’s knowledge on any subject may be at best extensive but never truly total as it appears there is always something new to discover or learn regarding just about anything.

I have also found that a legacy seems to be determined exclusively by others and is therefore something out of the control of the subject. So, so far from what I can understand, a legacy is a collection of people’s flawed and possibly differing notions of a subject, which does not seem like a very good definition or at least not a very satisfying one. Then again, maybe it is not my place to find an answer. Maybe I can add to the conversation by simply posing more questions and making everything a little bit messier. Maybe that is all we can do.

Given a legacy’s apparent capability to continuously change in time and the fact that it is not determined by any of the subject’s actions, words or characteristics but rather how they will be viewed by others, one question (or three) comes to me. Should we worry about our own legacy? As individuals? As part of a certain group or society?

What we leave behind after we are gone does seem to matter, but exactly how much it matters is not in our power to determine, so maybe we should just try our best to be an do better anyway. Just not so someone a few hundred years later will think of us in a good light and not because it seems morally to be the right thing to do. We should just try our best because we actually want to.

Thank you and please take care of each other.