The Clot, a winding path that leads to the so-called beach—a cramped, rocky cove softened only by brown layers of decaying seaweed—a mile below Deia, Majorca, where I’m staying for the month of September. That is not a complaint: who needs a beach in a place as beautiful as this?
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I haven't been doing much of anything here In Deia, on the north shore of Majorca, since I finished the first chapter of The Intellectual Earthquake and sent it off to some ideal readers—three dear friends, three experts in the fields I have to address, and three very smart non-academics (a cop, a carpenter, an intensive-care physician). Writing that chapter since April has kept me busy, and off Substack, except for the recent piece on Josh Hawley and the problem of patriarchy for Project Syndicate. The chapter is a 40 K word summary judgement on pragmatism—it says everything I’ve wanted to for all these years—which among other things explains how it can be understood as the realization or substantiation of the ethical foundations of Marxism (I know how weird that sounds) and why its impact on European intellectuals has been more or less ignored.
The French Connection comes next—that is, how William James and Josiah Royce infiltrated, or rather produced, the philosophical discourse that culminated in what we know as “French Theory” by way of Jean Wahl, the Zelig of European intellectual life, ca. 1920-1950. He’s the man who studied with Bergson, Marcel, and Heidegger, hung around with Hippolyte, Levinas, Koyre, Leiris, Aron, de Rougemont, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Kojeve, and Deleuze, and wrote about James, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard in ways that profoundly shaped European intellectual life at mid-20th century. Among other things, he’s responsible, shall we say, for the renaissance in the study of Hegel that led to Kojeve’s lectures of 1933-1939 and Hippolyte’s massive book on The Phenomenology; for the reinterpretation of Kierkegaard that deeply informed Levinas’s (re)discovery of the Other; for the insistently radical empiricism that became Deleuze’s intellectual signature; and thus, at another remove, for the dazzling effects we now read in the works of Foucault and Derrida.
Here’s an example of how Wahl saw the relation between the formidable high theorists of the Continental tradition and the friendly homespun pragmatists of the Anglo-American tradition, from Vers le concret (1932), a book that was the pivot of interwar and postwar European debates on humanism and existentialism, immanence and transcendence; this footnote appears in the section of the preface where Wahl is explaining the connections between the concepts deployed by Gabriel Marcel, Alfred North Whitehead, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger, each of whom was a close reader of William James: “There would also be reason to take account of certain tendencies of the pragmatist movement, and Heidegger has sensed this by integrating certain profound features of pragmatist thought into his meditation (Sein und Zeit, 61, 68).”
Meanwhile, the pace of Trump's cases and the larger campaign has been slow enough to lead me into a desultory daily regime of just looking, the kind that comes of being in a place where everything is different, and this lassitudinal posture has been enforced by a sore throat bad enough to prohibit solid food for three days. All I’ve been able to do is look.
At first glance, Deia doesn’t seem all that different from Puerto Vallarta, our other “vacation” destination (the word is in quotes because neither of us seems ever to stop writing something, and both of us usually get going on some writing project large or small, when—perhaps because—we relocate outside the States). Like Puerto Vallarta, it’s a frontier outpost of the Spanish empire that was forged between the 13th and the 17th centuries which has now become a magnet for English-speaking tourists and expats. (According to the NYT, about half of England’s population has made its way here as tourists in the last few years; the lads head south, the wealthy head north.)
But Majorca is more like Sicily than any province of present-day Mexico: it’s been invaded, overrun, renounced, and reconquered as many times, by as many different armies, rulers, kings, and popes, as that benighted island off the coast of Italy. The history isn’t any deeper here, except maybe geologically, it’s just a whole lot more variegated. (A Muslim kingdom was overthrown and reinstated several times between 1228 and 1497, it’s been a pirate’s fiefdom like Cuba, and so on.)
The island of Majorca is three mountain ranges running SW-NE that are separated by a fertile basin, where olives, almonds, and citrus grow profusely. But the basic industry of the place is tourism: you can tell by the size and efficiency of the international airport—the baggage claim area is ten times the size of the entire airport in Puerto Vallarta—and by the quality of the roads that take you from there up into the mountains, where the resort towns are.*** That airport is in the largest city, Palma, at the southwest corner of the central basin, about 140 miles south of Barcelona. Deia is a tiny hamlet about 30 kilometers up the road from Palma, which looks toward Spain from the north coast of Majorca.
That’s from above the town of Deia, looking toward Barcelona across the Mediterranean. We’re in the northern mountain range, pretty clearly, Serra de Tramuntana, situated below Valdemossa to our west, where Frederic Chopin and George Sand spent a winter at an abandoned monastery in the late 1830s—the piano where he composed the famous 24 Etudes is still there—and above Soller to our east, where a former “port” (more like an inlet) now serves as a marina and a poor man’s beach. Here’s Valdemossa on a Sunday, market day, down the street from the bus stop and around the corner from the monastery; then Chopin’s piano and the Etudes in manuscript; then the edifice of the monastery itself, now a museum.
Deia is tiny, like I said, two very small groceries, one pharmacy, a bike shop (of course!), and an ice cream parlor (it’s a resort town!). Did I mention the ten restaurants packed into the “downtown” of three blocks, one of them, Sauerschell’s, a One-Star Michelin destination that is 65 steps from our lovely little house, up from the main drag by a hundred? We’ve been to three of these restaurants (not the Michelin), and they’re very good, but not cheap. That’s the “supermarket” downtown. The gentleman at the table is called “Dracula” by the many resident Renfields because he speaks Spanish with a Romanian accent; his companion, a permanent resident and quite possibly an owner of the store who will later in the day be found sprawled across the juice machine inside, proves he can’t be a vampire.
Having seen a few pics I took from atop the hill where Eglesias de Sant Joan de Baptiste sits (see below), a friend I met in Puerto Vallarta—like the girlfriend, he’s an alum of the Marxist Literary Group convened by Fredric Jameson back in the 80s— asked how I get up and down the stairs and steep inclines that are the groundwork of this place. I told him I can climb the hills with the help of my trusty cane—the legs are still recovering from surgery in 2022—but only up to a point. There’s no avoiding them, anyway, because, face it, we’re living with the goats on the side of a mountain range.
The small consolation I feel when clumping up some 40 degree incline comes from the knowledge that everybody does it in stages. By this I mean that nobody drives or walks or rides straight up and down the side of this mountain. The roads are a set of switch-backs built on stone walls, so they’re rarely flat, but they’re not too steep to move (or stop moving) from a standing start in rain. Otherwise there’d be no traffic between towns except by horse or donkey. The streets are similarly arranged to move you on foot from tier to tier in a zig zag pattern, so you quickly lose any sense of direction except that provided by the immediate sensation of up or down—no wonder that once upon a time, heaven and hell didn’t seem so far away.
All by way of saying that what fastens civilization to Serra de Tramuntana are the walls that turn its forbidding sides into narrow, terraced “floors” made of stone ripped from the mountain itself. The olive trees would grow without these flat surfaces, and people would build inhabitable dwellings, but the harvests would remain meager because only the agile could get to the trees, and families wouldn’t become populations because surpluses wouldn’t make commerce conceivable by making passable roads necessary. So the most important man on this island since the first human settlement, then as now, is the stonemason, the person who can imagine, design, build, and repair these walls: without them, nothing. (My first question on arrival in the cab from the airport was, “Jesus, how many stones did it take to build this place?” I was looking at the wall you see the stonemason repairing in the pic below.)
Thanks to the stonemason, the once wild, jagged edges of this mountain now look serrated, like so many giant staircases. But that doesn’t mean that sapiens have paved paradise. Just the opposite—Milton and Bunyan were right, our expulsion from Eden was a fortunate fall, because what we’ve done to the natural world we found, which includes our own bodies, our selves, has created the possibility of Heaven on earth. Also Hell, of course. These two have never been that far away, or apart.
***Apropos those fine roads, one of which you can see in the photo above, taken from the cemetery adjoining Eglesias de Sant Joan de Baptiste. My dear friend John McClure, who with Mary Lawlor visited us here in Deia a week ago, just sent a provincial press release from December 2022, announcing the installation of roadside plaques commemorating the people who built them: Esta carretera la ha construido un esclavo, more specifically, the 8000 Majorcans enslaved by the Nationalist government to build the roads between the coup in 1936 and 1942. These are “las carreteras principales de la isla, todavia en uso.” The enslaved built the main roads of Majorca that are still in use.
Very excited for your book on pragmatism!
Wonderful account of Deiá and the centrality of the stonemasons in its history! And the dark shadows of the Civil War in those roads...I like the way you anchor the overview of the many conquests and invasions of Mallorca in the Muslim kingdoms, rather than in the usual "reconquest" point of view. And I love your shot and comment on "Dracula," sitting in front of the miniscule Supermarket. Interesting how he models possibilities for what a tourist-become-expat might look like in Deiá.