housing, and the rest of the Olson orchard is on its way out. What does it mean, this rainbow-colored apple with the bite taken out of it, which appears everywhere on Apple computers and on the many commodities (mugs, key rings, t-shirts) Apple markets, this emblem that seems to sum up the Santa Clara Valley’s change from agriculture to technology? It seems to have been appropriated to connote simplicity and wholesomeness, though apples aren’t rainbow colored in anything but the sloppiest associationof positive emblems; and the bite also recalls temptation in Eden: the emblem is denatured, reassuring, and threatening all at once. But more than that, it is forgettable, dead in the imagination, part of nowhere—it has been a decade since I last pondered the Apple logo, which has become part of a landscape of disassociation in which the apple image connotes neither sustenance nor metaphor, only a consumer choice, the fruit of the tree of information at the center of the garden of merging paths.
2
BORDERS AND CROSSERS
A Route in the Shape of a Question
[2004]
The incomparable writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin long imagined that his life could be drawn as a map, but never imagined that the map would come to an abrupt termination in Port Bou, Spain, in 1940. In 1939, when the dictator Francisco Franco declared an end to the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of refugees walked north over the Pyrenees, seeking shelter in France. They expected to be welcomed as defenders of democracy, but many were forced into camps. A year later, the tide had turned, and refugees from the Third Reich and the Vichy regime began trickling into Spain, seeking passage out of Europe altogether through Spanish or Portuguese ports. Benjamin, a Berlin Jew who had been living in Paris for many years, was one of them, and the tale of his walk from France to Spain has acquired something of the aura of a legend in the academic and intellectual circles where he matters most, for at the end of it he died.
A map of an altogether different sort fell into my hands when I went to Port Bou to retrace Benjamin’s final walk. I had expected that my task would be an obscure one, but as soon as we arrived in the town, my companion and I found a kiosk by the little beach bearing maps of the region and an unfolded brochure on Benjamin and the monument to him that stands on the edge of town. The brochure contains a greatly reduced topographical map on which his final walk is marked with a thick orange line. There were other surprises. Most accounts say that he “walked across the Pyrenees,” but by the time the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean, they are only steep hills, not the mountains I had always pictured.
Port Bou and the nearest French town of Cerberes (Portbou and Cervera are the Spanish spellings) are separated by a range of hills and connected by a tunnel. The French trains run on a different gauge track than the Spanish, so each town represents the terminus of a foreign system. It would’ve taken us two trains and several hours to get from Port Bou, where we woke up, to Banyuls, the second-to-last French town on the Mediterranean, where Benjamin began his walk, so we gave up halfway and took a taxi from Cerberes. The young man who drove us was affably multilingual, chatting to us in French and broken English and asking directions in Catalonian of a gaunt old man rearranging the stones on one of the terraces of a vineyard. At our request, he took us up into the steep amphitheater of grape terraces behind the town and left us in what to him looked like the middle of nowhere. We wouldn’t have minded walking there, but we weren’t sure we could have found the right road out of town.
The Mediterranean was blue, the unripe grapes were the same green as the leaves of the vines, and the ground was covered with the same deep-brown shale that the terraces, culverts, and occasional huts were made from, a stone that broke up into flat tablets and
2
BORDERS AND CROSSERS
A Route in the Shape of a Question
[2004]
The incomparable writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin long imagined that his life could be drawn as a map, but never imagined that the map would come to an abrupt termination in Port Bou, Spain, in 1940. In 1939, when the dictator Francisco Franco declared an end to the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of refugees walked north over the Pyrenees, seeking shelter in France. They expected to be welcomed as defenders of democracy, but many were forced into camps. A year later, the tide had turned, and refugees from the Third Reich and the Vichy regime began trickling into Spain, seeking passage out of Europe altogether through Spanish or Portuguese ports. Benjamin, a Berlin Jew who had been living in Paris for many years, was one of them, and the tale of his walk from France to Spain has acquired something of the aura of a legend in the academic and intellectual circles where he matters most, for at the end of it he died.
A map of an altogether different sort fell into my hands when I went to Port Bou to retrace Benjamin’s final walk. I had expected that my task would be an obscure one, but as soon as we arrived in the town, my companion and I found a kiosk by the little beach bearing maps of the region and an unfolded brochure on Benjamin and the monument to him that stands on the edge of town. The brochure contains a greatly reduced topographical map on which his final walk is marked with a thick orange line. There were other surprises. Most accounts say that he “walked across the Pyrenees,” but by the time the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean, they are only steep hills, not the mountains I had always pictured.
Port Bou and the nearest French town of Cerberes (Portbou and Cervera are the Spanish spellings) are separated by a range of hills and connected by a tunnel. The French trains run on a different gauge track than the Spanish, so each town represents the terminus of a foreign system. It would’ve taken us two trains and several hours to get from Port Bou, where we woke up, to Banyuls, the second-to-last French town on the Mediterranean, where Benjamin began his walk, so we gave up halfway and took a taxi from Cerberes. The young man who drove us was affably multilingual, chatting to us in French and broken English and asking directions in Catalonian of a gaunt old man rearranging the stones on one of the terraces of a vineyard. At our request, he took us up into the steep amphitheater of grape terraces behind the town and left us in what to him looked like the middle of nowhere. We wouldn’t have minded walking there, but we weren’t sure we could have found the right road out of town.
The Mediterranean was blue, the unripe grapes were the same green as the leaves of the vines, and the ground was covered with the same deep-brown shale that the terraces, culverts, and occasional huts were made from, a stone that broke up into flat tablets and
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