On the Spanish poet & refugee Antonio Machado.
All four of my grandparents were refugees; my mother was a refugee, and her only sibling was twice a refugee by the age of thirty-five. Sometimes, therefore, I feel mildly guilty at my own comparatively smooth passage through life, as if it were in some sense my duty to have experienced it as a vale of tears, and selfish of me not to have done so. Insofar as I have experienced misery, it has been overwhelmingly of my own making—one definition, I suppose, of a free and fortunate person.
What is it to arrive in a foreign country, having fled imminent persecution and possible death, with no belongings and no obvious means of support? This was the question that ran through my mind constantly in Collioure, the beautiful and charming (not to say chichi) port on the Mediterranean French coast, not far from the Spanish border. Who would not be reconciled to life, lunching excellently under the warming winter sun near the little beach of the fishing port, the wavelets of the Mediterranean lapping gently nearby? Hedonism is natural here; anything else would seem inappropriate.
But before my visit Collioure had for me just one connotation, that of the place where the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado died in exile as a refugee, on February 22, 1939, a mere twenty-five days after his arrival. Of course, Collioure had been a place favored by artists well before Machado arrived, and the former Hôtel de la Gare, no longer a hotel, has a plaque commemorating the stay of Henri Matisse and André Derain there in 1905. But for me, Collioure meant Machado.
Continue reading the piece here at The New Criterion
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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