Leafing once more through Walter Benjamin. A Critical Life I come upon Benjamin's daily routine while he was living in Ibiza in the summer of 1932. I was surprised to see that he finished his days by reading the Belgian detective writer Georges Simenon by candlelight. A year before, in 1931, Simenon had organised a ball on February 20, which made him famous. The guests had to be dressed up as criminals or as police agents while he signed his first Maigret novels M. Gallet décédé and Le pendu de Saint-Pholien. Did Benjamin attend the party?
Another interesting side-fact that I found out while looking on the Wikipedia page of Simenon, is that, in the 1920s, Simenon was the secretary and lover of Josephine Baker. Apparently, he had to flee from Paris to escape her because he was becoming too much "Monsieur Josephine Baker".
I'm interested in schedules, and maybe you are too. So here follows the daily routine of Benjamin in Ibiza. He wrote it down in a letter to Gretel Karplus (also known as the wife of Adorno), addressing her as "Felizitas" and signing with his penname "Detlef" or "Detlef Holz". This daily regimen was to keep him productive during his exile:
He rises at 6 or 6:30 am, goes down to the ocean for a bath and swim, then leaves for his hidden study place in the woods where he works outdoors with the aid of a lounge chair (which he had hidden in the bushes), blanket, thermos bottle. There he reads Lucretius for an hour, has breakfast at 8am. Then he starts working till 1pm, often pausing at noon for a short walk in the woods. He has lunch in town (San Antonio) around 2pm, and afterwards likes to sit under a nearby fig tree to read or scribble, followed by playing card games or dominoes, or conversation in a café. Back in his room, shared with "three hundred flies" he is in bed by 9 or 9:30 pm, reading a Simenon detective novel by candlelight.