The first thing that drew my attention was the library, I remember. I had only seen one other like it before. When I used to visit the home of J.V. Foix in Barcelona, I was always surprised by the impeccable, unanimous leather bindings of the Greek and Latin classics published by the Fundació Bernat Metge, exalted in their very noble wrappings. Those books, and a few more, just a few, that he may have loved, were visibly the true center of Foix’s moral life. Now, in Majorca, I saw the sun, bright and yellow, singeing or else chiseling the dark green of the olive trees, and the flashes of the sea, of a very pure blue, with a wounding, knifelike glow emerging between the cracks in the promontories. Two friends and I entered a house very different from Foix’s. Rustic, with a trail outside, and every room overwhelmed by the light. Less than a site of meditative contemplation, that room gave the impression of a workplace. High shelves bore thick books, well maintained; not classical texts, but Greek and Latin dictionaries and anthologies of myths. There was – if we looked closely – an instinctive communion between the earthy clarity of the landscape and the mythical world throbbing in the heart of those tomes. Archeology as a lived poem.
The house’s owner was around seventy-five years old: he received us in the garden with a straw hat on his head. The landscape was a part of him, too: he said he had chosen to live in Deià years before because life there followed the cycles of the crops. The eyes know that there, beyond the warm and shaded clarity of the olive trees, lies the sea, refulgent as the blade of a blue sword or the gleaming of a shield. For the eyes, this means a great deal: this was the world of Homer; this was even the world of Virgil. The appearance of the moon, during the very bright summer nightfall, suggests to us of the white goddess who illuminates his poems.
Will we learn to make of ourselves something akin to the earth, akin to history, akin to the impress of the memory of the gods, akin to the rhythms and cadences that mark the time of life and vision? To see the world, to live the world, not only to live in the world. To live it as this man we were speaking with knew how to live it, this British poet and writer, Robert Graves.
It was already turning dark when he went with us through the garden and out onto the path. A TV reporter filmed him while he spoke vivaciously and at length in his straw hat. Some time back, they had broadcast on television scenes from one of this man’s books: I, Claudius. Something older than the images, something like the dark root of an olive tree or like the green-glimmering leaf beneath the brilliance of the moon, lit up, with the fractious light of nightfall, the library of Robert Graves in a village in Majorca.
4 July 1980