Calle de Baltasar Gracián

Calle de Baltasar Gracián is short and discreet, brushing along its north flank the neo-Mudéjar building of the Catholic Institute of Arts and Industries, raised between 1903 and 1905 for the Society of Jesus. The pairing has its wit: Gracián was a Jesuit, and the façade facing the street belonged to the same order that trained him. Almost all his work came out under a pseudonym or signed by his brother, a ruse to dodge the Society’s superiors, who reproached him for writing in Castilian rather than Latin. The third part of El Criticón (1657) exhausted their patience, and they punished him without half measures: public reprimand, a fast on bread and water, a ban on using ink and paper, and banishment. He died in Tarazona in 1658. What came after raised him higher than what he lived. Schopenhauer learned Spanish to render his Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia into German, and Nietzsche called it the most ambitious book on the art of living. That German reception carried Gracián’s moral prose all the way to 20th-century continental philosophy.