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osep Pla explains that in the times when boats began to move by motor, when a stranger set foot in Formentera, he remained one until the arrival of another stranger took away that condition. Little accustomed to foreign presences, the news spread so quickly that when the newcomer entered an establishment, or crossed paths with some curious person, they would address him to say: -so you are the stranger. In Pla's words, Formentera was a paradise of modest but real happiness. It is a judgment that is still valid even now. The Formenterans themselves, however, did not see it that way. We lack so many things!, they would say. When the man from Empordà asked them what these things were that they cried out for, the plea ended up being limited to little more than an excessive interest in living among pharmacists, doctors, and lawyers. Then Pla would respond to them, referring to the island, that it, a country of healthy people and without lawsuits, fortunately for them, became unpleasant for career people. Even so, he did not manage to detach them from the nostalgia they felt for the bad continental life.
It is not strange that certain continental souls, especially the tormented ones, occasionally seek refuge in the slow inertia of the islandsThe idea of happiness (modest but real) attributed to islands is a consequence of not experiencing units of time in the same way they are experienced on the mainland. But one only perceives this quality if one is a foreigner. This fact is largely explained by the isolation itself, which undoubtedly makes the broad cycles of influence that forge character more fertile: the legacy of great empires, the inheritance of periods of invasion and winds, effluvia of wisdom. In the same way as with people exposed to long intervals of stillness, islands are identities much closer to fullness. On the contrary, the continental character, excluding territories with scarce communication routes, is incomplete and always interfered with by noise and brief and changing stimuli that come from the transfer of neighboring lands. It is not strange that certain continental souls, especially tormented ones, occasionally seek refuge in the slow inertia of the islands.
Baltasar Porcel explains that Tiberius, the Roman emperor, found in the islands the perfect fit for his distrustful, malevolent, and avaricious temperament and condition. As a young man, he secluded himself on Rhodes, and in old age, on Capri, where he indulged in orgies and sadism. Others found the perfect hiding place for smuggling, or a place from which to abandon themselves to soporific yawns. The solace of an orchard that proclaims true fruit and clouds that, like a lighthouse for the wandering navigators that we are—by entrusting life to mobile phones—return us to the original course, bringing us closer to detail, to the skin we desire, to the perfume and chromatic arrangement.
An island is an idea for romantics, schizophrenics, lunatics. A circle of invisible complicities woven to preserve the secret of a way of life that is difficult to describe. Perhaps the most accurate term is diaphanous. Diaphanous lifeIn Sicily, for example, the degree of parsimony of the inland roads, the drift of someone working in the kitchen while waiting for the coffee to brew, or the dream of someone in the bar watching a card game does not correspond to that of a good part of the continental towns. Nor in Camiguin, the island with the most volcanoes and churches per square meter on the planet, with exuberant nature, a market crowded with flies and with the face of Jesus Christ, defiant like that of Che, Kurt Cobain or Janis Joplin, stamped on the chest of T-shirts. And neither in Rosala, an ancient Viking settlement where in winter they play at following the morbid trickle of imprecise bodies in the sauna.
An island is an idea for romantics, schizophrenics, lunatics. A circle of invisible complicities woven to preserve the secret of a way of life that is difficult to describe. Perhaps the most accurate thing would be to call it diaphanous. Diaphanous life. And by diaphanous, with no other remedy, of solitude, longing, and exempt from neat sentimentality. Look, if not, how Sappho, the poetess of Lesbos -genesis of lesbianism- draws it in one of her verses: on a soft bed / I will lay my limbs.
Despair perpetuated Sappho's condition as a stranger. Her despair, like all despairs, wanted time and achievable limits and, on the island, despite the torment, she found her corner.Little of Sappho's work survives. The documents burned in the bonfires of the Catholic Church. She dedicated part of her art to writing songs on commission. Largely for weddings, and among these, for the weddings of her students, with whom she fell madly in love, as she expressed, without reservation, in some of her verses.: He seems to me equal to the gods / the man who before you / sits, and from near hears you / speak sweetly / and charming laughter; this truly, / strikes my heart within my chest, / for when I look at you for an instant, it is no longer possible for me / to say a word [...].
Despair perpetuated in Sappho the condition of a stranger. A constant and parsimonious re-encounter with the familiar contours of Lesbos that kept her in the role of an outsider. Her despair, like all despairs, wanted time and achievable limits and, on the island, despite the torment, she found her corner; a corner of happiness, modest but real.
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