That conversation taught me immediately that the Greeks are an enthusiastic, curious-minded, passionate people. Passion—it was something I had long missed in France. Not only passion, but contradictoriness, confusion, chaos—all these sterling human qualities I rediscovered and cherished again in the person of my new-found friend. And generosity. I had almost thought it had perished from the earth.
The electric lights strung along the waterfront create a Japanese effect; there is something impromptu about the lighting in all Greek ports, something which gives the impression of an impending festival. As you pull into port the little boats come out to meet you: they are filled with passengers and luggage and livestock and bedding and furniture. The men row standing up, pushing instead of pulling. They seem absolutely tireless, moving their heavy burdens about at will with deft and almost imperceptible movements of the wrist. As they draw alongside a pandemonium sets in. Everybody goes the wrong way, everything is confused, chaotic, disorderly. But nobody is ever lost or hurt, nothing is stolen, no blows are exchanged. It is a kind of ferment which is created by reason of the fact that for a Greek every event, no matter how stale, is always unique. He is always doing the same thing for the first time: he is curious, avidly curious, and experimental. He experiments for the sake of experimenting, not to establish a better or more efficient way of doing things. He likes to do things with his hands, with his whole body, with his soul, I might as well say.
I felt completely detached from Europe. I had entered a new realm as a free man—everything had conjoined to make the experience unique and fructifying, Christ, I was happy. But for the first time in my life I was happy with the full consciousness of being happy. It’s good to be just plain happy; it’s a little better to know that you’re happy; but to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how, in what way, because of what concatenation of events or circumstances, and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it.
Then the pass, which I shall always think of as the carrefour of meaningless butcheries. Here the most frightful, vengeful massacres must have been perpetrated again and again throughout the endless bloody past of man. It is a trap devised by Nature herself for man’s undoing. Greece is full of such death-traps. It is like a strong cosmic note which gives the diapason to the intoxicating light world wherein the heroic and mythological figures of the resplendent past threaten continually to dominate the consciousness. The ancient Greek was a murderer: he lived amidst brutal clarities which tormented and maddened the spirit. He was at war with every one, including himself. Out of this fiery anarchy came the lucid, healing metaphysical speculations which even to-day enthrall the world.
I also reread Nijinsky’s Diary. I know I shall read it again and again. There are only a few books which I can read over and over—one is Mysteries and another is The Eternal Husband. Perhaps I should also add Alice in Wonderland.
At that moment I rejoiced that I was free of possessions; free of all ties, free of fear and envy and malice. I could have passed quietly from one dream to another, owning nothing, regretting nothing, wishing nothing. I was never more certain that life and death are one and that neither can be enjoyed or embraced if the other be absent.
I like the monologue even more than the duet, when it is good. It’s like watching a man write a book expressly for you: he writes it, reads it aloud, acts it, revises it, savours it, enjoys it, enjoys your enjoyment of it, and then tears it up and throws it to the winds. It’s a sublime performance, because while he’s going through with it you are God for him—unless you happen to be an insensitive and impatient dolt. But in that case the kind of monologue I refer to never happens.
He had drunk a lot of rezina in his time: he said it was good for one, good for the kidneys, good for the liver, good for the lungs, good for the bowels and for the mind, good for everything. Everything he took into his system was good, whether it was poison or ambrosia. He didn’t believe in moderation nor good sense nor anything that was inhibitory. He believed in going the whole hog and then taking your punishment.
All this flurry and din, all these kaleidoscopic prestidigitations of his, was only a sort of wizardry which he employed to conceal the fact that he was a prisoner—that was the impression he gave me when I studied him, when I could break the spell for a moment and observe him attentively. But to break the spell required a power and a magic almost equal to his own; it made one feel foolish and impotent, as one always does when one succeeds in destroying the power of illusion. Magic is never destroyed—the most we can do is to cut ourselves off, amputate the mysterious antennae which serve to connect us with forces beyond our power of understanding. Many a time, as Katsimbalis talked, I caught that look on the face of a listener which told me that the invisible wires had been connected, that something was being communicated which was over and above language, over and above personality, something magical which we recognize in dream and which makes the face of the sleeper relax and expand with a bloom such as we rarely see in waking life. Often when meditating on this quality of his I thought of his frequent allusions to the incomparable honey which is stored by the bees on the slopes of his beloved Hymettos. Over and over he would try to explain the reasons why this honey from Mount Hymettos was unique. Nobody can explain it satisfactorily. Nobody can explain anything which is unique. One can describe, worship and adore. And that is all I can do with Katsimbalis’ talk.
The Frenchman puts walls about his talk, as he does about his garden: he puts limits about everything in order to feel at home. At bottom he lacks confidence in his fellow man; he is skeptical because he doesn’t believe in the innate goodness of human beings. He has become a realist because it is safe and practical. The Greek, on the other hand, is an adventurer: he is reckless and adaptable, he makes friends easily. The walls which you see in Greece, when they are not of Turkish or Venetian origin, go back to the Cyclopean age. Of my own experience I would say that there is no more direct, approachable, easy man to deal with than the Greek. He becomes a friend immediately: he goes out to you. With the Frenchman friendship is a long and laborious process: it may take a lifetime to make a friend of him. He is best in acquaintanceship where there is little to risk and where there are no aftermaths. The very word ami contains almost nothing of the flavor of friend, as we feel it in English. C’est mon ami can not be translated by “this is my friend.” There is no counterpart to this English phrase in the French language. It is a gap which has never been filled, like the word “home.” These things affect conversation. One can converse all right, but it is difficult to have a heart to heart talk. All France, it has often been said, is a garden, and if you love France, as I do, it can be a very beautiful garden. For myself I found it healing and soothing to the spirit; I recovered from the shocks and bruises which I had received in my own country. But there comes a day, when you are well again and strong, when this atmosphere ceases to be nourishing. You long to break out and test your powers. Then the French spirit seems inadequate. You long to make friends, to create enemies, to look beyond walls and cultivated patches of earth. You want to cease thinking in terms of life insurance, sick benefits, old age pensions and so on.
I liked the way they begged too. They weren’t shamefaced about it. They would hold you up openly and ask for money or cigarettes as if they were entitled to it. It’s a good sign when people beg that way: it means that they know how to give. The French, for example, know neither how to give nor how to ask for favors—either way they feel uneasy. They make a virtue of not molesting you. It’s the wall again. A Greek has no walls around him: he gives and takes without stint.
There are so many ways of walking about and the best, in my opinion, is the Greek way, because it is aimless, anarchic, thoroughly and discordantly human.
We had about fifty words with which to make lingual currency. We didn’t even need that many, as I soon discovered. There are a thousand ways of talking and words don’t help if the spirit is absent. Karamenaios and I were eager to talk. It made little difference to me whether we talked about the war or about knives and forks. Sometimes we discovered that a word or phrase which we had been using for days, he in English or I in Greek, meant something entirely different than we had thought it to mean. It made no difference. We understood one another even with the wrong words. I could learn five new words in an evening and forget six or eight during my sleep. The important thing was the warm handclasp, the light in the eyes, the grapes which we devoured in common, the glass we raised to our lips in sign of friendship.
I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven’t the faintest idea what it’s about or why people should enjoy killing one another; you look at a place like Albania—it was constantly staring me in the eyes—and you say to yourself, yesterday it’s Greek, to-day it’s Italian, to-morrow it may be German or Japanese, and you let it be anything it chooses to be.
One should not race along the Sacred Way in a motor car—it is sacrilege. One should walk, walk as the men of old walked, and allow one’s whole being to become flooded with light. This is not a Christian highway: it was made by the feet of devout pagans on their way to initiation at Eleusis. There is no suffering, no martyrdom, no flagellation of the flesh connected with this processional artery. Everything here speaks now, as it did.centuries ago, of illumination, of blinding, joyous illumination. Light acquires a transcendental quality: it is not the light of the Mediterranean alone, it is something more, something unfathomable, something holy. Here the light penetrates directly to the soul, opens the doors and windows of the heart, makes one naked, exposed, isolated in a metaphysical bliss. Which makes everything clear without being known. No analysis can go on in this light: here the neurotic is either instantly healed or goes mad. The rocks themselves are quite mad: they have been lying for centuries, exposed to this divine illumination: they lie very still and quiet, nestling amid dancing colored shrubs in a blood-stained soil, but they are mad, I say, and to touch them is to risk losing one’s grip on everything which once seemed firm, solid and unshakeable. One must glide through this gully with extreme caution, naked, alone, and devoid of all Christian humbug. One must throw off two thousand years of ignorance and superstition, of morbid, sickly subterranean living and lying. One must come to Eleusis stripped of the barnacles which have accumulated from centuries of lying in stagnant waters. At Eleusis one realizes, if never before, that there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. At Eleusis one becomes adapted to the cosmos. Outwardly Eleusis may seem broken, disintegrated with the crumbled past; actually Eleusis is still intact and it is we who are broken, dispersed, crumbling to dust. Eleusis lives, lives eternally in the midst of a dying world.
Hydra is a rock which rises out of the sea like a huge loaf of petrified bread. It is the bread turned to stone which the artist receives as reward for his labors when he first catches sight of the promised land. After the uterine illumination comes the ordeal of rock out of which must be born the spark which is to fire the world. I speak in broad, swift images because to move from place to place in Greece is to become aware of the stirring, fateful drama of the race as it circles from paradise to paradise. Each halt is a stepping stone along a path marked out by the gods. They are stations of rest, of prayer, of meditation, of deed, of sacrifice, of transfiguration. At no point along the way is it marked FINIS. The very rocks, and nowhere on earth has God been so lavish with them as in Greece, are symbols of life eternal. In Greece the rocks are eloquent: men may go dead but the rocks never. At a place like Hydra, for example, one knows that when a man dies he becomes part of his native rock. But this rock is a living rock, a divine wave of energy suspended in time and space, creating a pause of long or short duration in the endless melody. Hydra was entered as a pause in the musical score of creation by an expert calligrapher. It is one of those divine pauses which permit the musician, when he resumes the melody, to go forth again in a totally new direction. At this point one may as well throw the compass away. To move towards creation does one need a compass? Having touched this rock I lost all sense of earthly direction. What happened to me from this point on is in the nature of progression, not direction. There was no longer any goal beyond—I became one with the Path. Each station thenceforth marked a progression into a new spiritual latitude and longitude. Mycenae was not greater than Tiryns nor Epidaurus more beautiful than Mycenae: each was different in a degree for which I had lost the circle of comparison.
We sat on deck watching the sinking sun. It was one of those Biblical sunsets in which man is completely absent. Nature simply opens her bloody, insatiable maw and swallows everything in sight. Law, order, morality, justice, wisdom, any abstraction seems like a cruel joke perpetrated on a helpless world of idiots. Sunset at sea is for me a dread spectacle: it is hideous, murderous, soulless. The earth may be cruel but the sea is heartless. There is absolutely no place of refuge; there are only the elements and the elements are treacherous.
The story which Katsimbalis was reeling off was one of those stories which begin as a trifling episode and end as an unfinished novel—unfinished because of lack of breath or space or time or because, as happened, he got sleepy and decided to take a nap. This story, which like all his stories I find it impossible to transcribe, lacking the patience and the finesse of a Thomas Mann, haunted me for days. It was not that the subject was so unusual, it was that with a good stretch of sea before us he felt at liberty to make the most extraordinary digressions, to dwell with scrupulous care and attention on the most trivial details. I have always felt that the art of telling a story consists in so stimulating the listener’s imagination that he drowns himself in his own reveries long before the end. The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plot I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with. Though it has been practised on me time and again I never cease to marvel how it happens that, with certain individuals whom I know, within a few minutes after greeting them we are embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the deep middle dream which the practised dreamer slips into like a bone into its socket. Often, after one of these suprasensible seances, endeavoring to recapture the thread which had broken, I would work my way back as far as some trifling detail—but between that bespangled point of repair and the mainland there was always an impassible void, a sort of no man’s land which the wizardry of the artist had encumbered with shell holes and quagmires and barbed wire.
To the infra-human specimens of this benighted scientific age the ritual and worship connected with the art of healing as practised at Epidaurus seems like sheer buncombe. In our world the blind lead the blind and the sick go to the sick to be cured. We are making constant progress, but it is a progress which leads to the operating table, to the poor house, to the insane asylum, to the trenches. We have no healers—we have only butchers whose knowledge of anatomy entitles them to a diploma which in turn entitles them to carve out or amputate our illnesses so that we may carry on in crippled fashion until such time as we are fit for the slaughter house. We announce the discovery of this cure and that but make no mention of the new diseases which we have created en route. The medical cult operates very much like the War Office—the triumphs which they broadcast are sops thrown out to conceal death and disaster. The medicos, like the military authorities, are helpless; they are waging a hopeless fight from the start. What man wants is peace in order that he may live. Defeating our neighbor doesn’t give peace any more than curing cancer brings health. Man doesn’t begin to live through triumphing over his enemy nor does he begin to acquire health through endless cures. The joy of life comes through peace, which is not static but dynamic. No man can really say that he knows what joy is until he has experienced peace. And without joy there is no life, even if you have a dozen cars, six butlers, a castle, a private chapel and a bomb-proof vault. Our diseases are our attachments, be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, phobias, gods, cults, religions, what you please. Good wages can be a disease just as much as bad wages. Leisure can be just as great a disease as work. Whatever we cling to, even if it be hope or faith, can be the disease which carries us off. Surrender is absolute: if you cling to even the tiniest crumb you nourish the germ which will devour you. As for clinging to God, God long ago abandoned us in order that we might realize the joy of attaining godhood through our own efforts.
The world is both young and old: like the individual, it renews itself in death and ages through infinite births. At every stage there is the possibility of fulfillment. Peace lies at any point along the line. It is a continuum and one that is just as undemonstrable by demarcation as a line is, undemonstrable by stringing points together. To make a line requires a totality of being, of will and of imagination. What constitutes a line, which is an exercise in metaphysics, one may speculate on for eternity. But even an idiot can draw a line, and in doing so he is the equal of the professor for whom the nature of a line is a mystery beyond all comprehension.
In Greece one has the conviction that genius is the norm, not mediocrity. No country has produced, in proportion to its numbers, as many geniuses as Greece. In one century alone this tiny nation gave to the world almost five hundred men of genius. Her art, which goes back fifty centuries, is eternal and incomparable. The landscape remains the most satisfactory, the most wondrous, that our earth has to offer. The inhabitants of this little world lived in harmony with their natural surroundings, peopling them with gods who were real and with whom they lived in intimate communion. The Greek cosmos is the most eloquent illustration of the unity of thought and deed. It persists even to-day, though its elements have long since been dispersed. The image of Greece, faded though it be, endures as an archetype of the miracle wrought by the human spirit. A whole people, as the relics of their achievements testify, lifted themselves to a point never before and never since attained. It was miraculous. It still is. The task of genius, and man is nothing if not genius, is to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only miraculously, die miraculously. It matters little how much is destroyed, if only the germ of the miraculous be preserved and nurtured.
We walk between the huge slabs of stone that form the circular enclosure. My book knowledge is nil. I can look on this mass of rubble with the eyes of a savage. I am amazed at the diminutive proportions of the palace chambers, of the dwelling places up above. What colossal walls to protect a mere handful of people! Was each and every inhabitant a giant? What dread darkness fell upon them in their evil days to make them burrow into the earth, to hide their treasures from the light, to murder incestuously in the deep bowels of the earth? We of the New World, with millions of acres lying waste and millions unfed, unwashed, unsheltered, we who dig into the earth, who work, eat, sleep, love, walk, ride, fight, buy, sell and murder there below ground, are we going the same way? I am a native of New York, the grandest and the emptiest city in the world; I am standing now at Mycenae, trying to understand what happened here over a period of centuries. I feel like a cockroach crawling about amidst dismantled splendors. It is hard to believe that somewhere back in the leaves and branches of the great genealogical tree of life my progenitors knew this spot, asked the same questions, fell back senseless into the void, were swallowed up and left no trace of thought save these ruins, the scattered relics in museums, a sword, an axe, a helmet, a death mask of beaten gold, a beehive tomb, an heraldic lion carved in stone, an exquisite drinking vase.
We come out on the far hillside into a panorama of blinding clarity. A shepherd with his flock moves about on a distant mountain side. He is larger than life, his sheep are covered with golden locks. He moves leisurely in the amplitude of forgotten time. He is moving amidst the still bodies of the dead, their fingers clasped in the short grass. He stops to talk with them, to stroke their beards. He was moving thus in Homeric times when the legend was being embroidered with copperish strands. He added a lie here and there, he pointed to the wrong direction, he altered his itinerary. For the shepherd the poet is too facile, too easily satiated. The poet would say “there was ... they were ...” But the shepherd says he lives, he is, he does... The poet is always a thousand years too late—and blind to boot. The shepherd is eternal, an earthbound spirit, a renunciator. On these hillsides forever and ever there will be the shepherd with his flock: he will survive everything, including the tradition of all that ever was.
In Paris one roams from quarter to quarter through imperceptible transitions, as if moving through invisible beaded curtains. In Greece the changes are sharp, almost painful. In some places you can pass through all the changes of fifty centuries in the space of five minutes. Everything is delineated, sculp-tured, etched. Even the waste lands have an eternal cast about them. You see everything in its uniqueness—a man sitting on a road under a tree: a donkey climbing a path near a mountain: a ship in a harbor in a sea of turquoise: a table on a terrace beneath a cloud. And so on. Whatever you look at you see as if for the first time; it won’t run away, it won’t be demolished overnight; it won’t disintegrate or dissolve or revolutionize itself. Every individual thing that exists, whether made by God or man, whether fortuitous or planned, stands out like a nut in an aureole of light, of time and of space. The shrub is the equal of the donkey; a wall is as valid as a belfry; a melon is as good as a man. Nothing is continued or perpetuated beyond its natural time; there is no iron will wreaking its hideous path of power. After a half hour’s walk you are refreshed and exhausted by the variety of the anomalous and sporadic. By comparison Park Avenue seems insane and no doubt is insane. The oldest building in Herakleion will outlive the newest building in America. Organisms die; the cell lives on. Life is at the roots, embedded in simplicity, asserting itself uniquely.
Greece is what everybody knows, even in absentia, even as a child or as an idiot or as a not-yet-born. It is what you expect the earth to look like given a fair chance. It is the subliminal threshold of innocence. It stands, as it stood from birth, naked and fully revealed. It is not mysterious or impenetrable, not awesome, not defiant, not pretentious. It is made of earth, air, fire and water. It changes seasonally with harmonious undulating rhythms. It breathes, it beckons, it answers.
The next morning we were at Canea where we remained until late that afternoon. I spent the time ashore eating and drinking and strolling about the town. The old part of the town was decidedly interesting; it had all the air of a Venetian stronghold which I believe it once was. The Greek part was as usual anomalous, straggling, thoroughly individualistic and eclectic. I had the sensation, only to a more intense degree, which I so often had in Greece—that the moment the power of the invader was halted or suspended, the moment the hand of authority relaxed, the Greek took up again his very natural, very human, always intimate, always understandable life of everyday routine. What is unnatural, and here in such deserted places it speaks so strongly, is the imposing power of castle, church, garrison, merchant. Power fades away in ugly decrepitude, leaving little vulture-like knobs of manifested will here and their to indicate the ravages of pride, envy, malice, greed, superstition, ritual, dogma. Left to his own resources man always begins again in the Greek way—a few goats or sheep, a rude hut, a patch of crops, a clump of olive trees, a running stream, a flute.
I was informed indirectly that I might have an excellent room with private bath at one of the best hotels for what I was paying at the Grand. I preferred to stay at the Grand. I liked the maids, the porters, the bell hops and the proprietor himself; I like hotels which are second or third rate, which are clean but shabby, which have seen better days, which have an aroma of the past. I liked the beetles and the huge water bugs which I always found in my room when I turned on the light. I liked the broad corridors and the toilets all jammed together like bath houses at the end of the hall. I liked the dismal courtyard and the sound of the male choir practising in a hall nearby.
I shall always remember the walks through Athens at night under the autumn stars. Often I would go up to a bluff just under Lykabettos and stand there for an hour or so gazing at the sky. What was wonderful about it was that it was so Greek—not just the sky, but the houses, the color of the houses, the dusty roads, the nakedness, the sounds that came out of the houses. Something immaculate about it. Somewhere beyond the “ammonia” region, in a forlorn district whose streets are named after the philosophers, I would stumble about in a silence so intense and so velvety at the same time that it seemed as if the atmosphere were full of powdered stars whose light made an inaudible noise. Athens and New York are electrically charged cities, unique in my experience. But Athens is permeated with a violet-blue reality which envelops you with a caress; New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness, if you have no inner stabilizer. In both cases the air is like champagne—a tonic, a revivifier. In Athens I experienced the joy of solitude; in New York I have always felt lonely, the loneliness of the caged animal, which brings on crime, sex, alcohol and other madnesses.
He asked me if it were possible, and he added that he knew it was a great deal to ask of a stranger, to give him two hundred drachmas more, which was the sum he required to pay his hotel bill. He added that even then he would be obliged to go without food. I immediately pulled out my wallet and handed him two hundred and fifty drachmas. It was now his turn to be astounded. He had asked, but apparently he had never dreamed of getting it. The tears came to his eyes. He began a wonderful speech which I cut short by saying that I had to catch up with my friends who had strolled ahead. I left him in the middle of the street with hat in hand, gazing after me as if I were a phantom. The incident put me in a good mood. “Ask,” said our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, “and it shall be given unto you.” Ask, mind you. Not demand, not beg, not wheedle or cajole. Very simple, I thought to myself. Almost too simple. And yet what better way is there?
I caught the full devastating beauty of the great plain of Thebes which we were approaching and, unable to control myself, I burst into tears. Why had no one prepared me for this? I cried out. I begged the driver to stop a moment in order to devour the scene with one full sweeping glance. We were not yet in the bed of the plain; we were amidst the low mounds and hummocks which had been stunned motionless by the swift messengers of light. We were in the dead center of that soft silence which absorbs even the breathing of the gods. Man had nothing to do with this, nor even nature. In this realm nothing moves nor stirs nor breathes save the finger of mystery; this is the hush that descends upon the world before the coming of a miraculous event. The event itself is not recorded here, only the passing of it, only the violet glow of its wake. This is an invisible corridor of time, a vast, breathless parenthesis which swells like the uterus and having bowelled forth its anguish relapses like a run-down clock. We glide through the long level plain, the first real oasis I have ever glimpsed. How am I to distinguish it from those other irrigated Paradises known to man? Was it more lush, more fertile, did it groan with a heavier weight of produce? Was it a thriving honey-comb of activity? I cannot say that I was made aware of any of these factors. The plain of Thebes was empty, empty of man, empty of visible produce. In the belly of this emptiness there throbbed a rich pulse of blood which was drained off in black furrowed veins. Through the thick pores of the earth the dreams of men long dead still bubbled and burst, their diaphanous filament carried skyward by flocks of startled birds.
By some unaccountable quirk the name Thebes, just as Memphis in Egypt, always brought to life a welter of fantastic memories and when, in the chill morgue of the museum there, I espied that most exquisite stone drawing so like one of Picasso’s illustrations, when I saw the rigid Egyptian-like colossi, I felt as if I were back in some familiar past, back in a world which I had known as a child. Thebes, even after one has visited it, remains in the memory very much like the vague, tremulous reveries which attend a long wait in the ante-chamber of a dentist’s office. Waiting to have a tooth extracted one often gets involved in the plan of a new book; one fairly seethes with ideas. Then comes the torture, the book is expunged from the consciousness, days pass in which nothing more brilliant is accomplished than sticking the tongue in a little cavity of the gum which seems enormous. Finally that too is forgotten and one is at work again and perhaps the new book is begun, but not as it was feverishly planned back in the cauterized waiting-room. And then, of a night when one tosses fitfully, plagued by swarms of irrelevant thoughts, suddenly the constellation of the lost tooth swims over the horizon and one is in Thebes, the old childhood Thebes from which all the novels have issued, and one sees the plan of the great life’s work finely etched on a tablet of stone—and this is the book one always meant to write but it is forgotten in the morning, and thus Thebes is forgotten and God and the whole meaning of life and one’s own identity and the identities of the past and so one worships Picasso who stayed awake all night and kept his bad tooth. This you know when you pass through Thebes, and it is disquieting, but it is also inspiring and when you are thoroughly inspired you hang yourself by the ankles and wait for the vultures to devour you alive.
The world which passed away with Delphi passed away as in a sleep. It is the same now. Victory and defeat are meaningless in the light of the wheel which relentlessly revolves. We are moving into a new latitude of the soul, and a thousand years hence men will wonder at our blindness, our torpor, our supine acquiescence to an order which was doomed.
I came again upon the colossal Theban statues which have never ceased to haunt me and finally we stood before the amazing statue of Antinous, last of the gods. I could not help but contrast in my mind this most wonderful idealization in stone of the eternal duality of man, so bold and simple, so thoroughly Greek in the best sense, with that literary creation of Balzac’s, Seraphita, which is altogether vague and mysterious and, humanly speaking, altogether unconvincing. Nothing could better convey the transition from light to darkness, from the pagan to the Christian conception of life, than this enigmatic figure of the last god on earth who flung himself into the Nile. By emphasizing the soulful qualities of man Christianity succeeded only in disembodying man; as angel the sexes fuse into the sublime spiritual being which man essentially is. The Greeks, on the other hand, gave body to everything, thereby incarnating the spirit and eternalizing it. In Greece one is ever filled with the sense of eternality which is expressed in the here and now; the moment one returns to the Western world, whether in Europe or America, this feeling of body, of eternality, of incarnated spirit is shattered. We move in clock time amidst the debris of vanished worlds, inventing the instruments of our own destruction, oblivious of fate or destiny, knowing never a moment of peace, possessing not an ounce of faith, a prey to the blackest superstitions, functioning neither in the body nor in the spirit, active not as individuals but as microbes in the organism of the diseased.
It seemed to me that we had just skirted the vicinity of the great battlefield of Platea and were perhaps facing Mount Kithaeron when suddenly I became aware of a curious trap-like formation through which we were whirling like a drunken cork. Again we had come to one of those formidable passes where the invading enemy had been slaughtered like pigs, a spot which must be the solace and the joy of defending generals everywhere. Here, it would not surprise me to discover, that Oedipus had met the Sphinx. I was profoundly disturbed, shaken to the roots. And by what? By associations born of my knowledge of ancient events? Scarcely, since I have but the scantiest knowledge of Greek history and even that is thoroughly confused, as is all history to me. No, as with the sacred places so with the murderous spots—the record of events is written into the earth. The real joy of the historian or the archaeologist when confronted with a discovery must lie in the fact of confirmation, corroboration, not in surprise. Nothing that has happened on this earth, however deeply buried, is hidden from man. Certain spots stand out like semaphores, revealing not only the due but the event—provided, to be sure, they are approached with utter purity of heart. I am convinced that there are many layers of history and that the final reading will be delayed until the gift of seeing past and future as one is restored to us.
Only in sorrow and suffering does man draw close to his fellow man; only then, it seems, does his life become beautiful.
Walking down a sunken planked street I stopped a moment to gaze at the window of a book shop, arrested by the sight of those lurid adventure magazines which one never expects to find in a foreign land but which flourish everywhere in every land, in every tongue almost. Conspicuous among them was a brilliant red-covered volume of Jules Verne, a Greek edition of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” What impressed me at the moment was the thought that the world in which this fantastic yarn lay buried was far more fantastic than anything Jules Verne had imagined. How could any one possibly imagine, coming out of the sky from another planet in the middle of the night, let us say, and finding himself in this weird community, that there existed on this earth other beings who lived in towering skyscrapers the very materials of which would baffle the mind to describe? And if there could be such a gulf between two worlds lying in such proximity what might be the gulf between the present world and the world to come? To see even fifty or a hundred years ahead taxes our imagination to the utmost; we are incapable of seeing beyond the repetitious cycle of war and peace, rich and poor, right and wrong, good and bad. Look twenty thousand years ahead: do you still see battleships, skyscrapers, churches, lunatic asylums, slums, mansions, national frontiers, tractors, sewing machines, canned sardines, little liver pills, etc. etc.? How will these things be eradicated? How will the new world, brave or poor, come about? Looking at the beautiful volume of Jules Verne I seriously asked myself the question— how will it come about? I wondered, indeed, if the elimination of these things ever seriously occupy our imagination. For as I stood there day dreaming I had the impression that everything was at a stand still, that I was not a man living in the twentieth century but a visitor from no century seeing what he had seen before and would see again and again, and the thought that that might be possible was utterly depressing.
Money has been the one thing I have never had, and yet I have led a rich life and in the main a happy one. Why should I need money now—or later? When I have been desperately in need I have always found a friend. I go on the assumption that I have friends everywhere. I shall have more and more as time goes on. If I were to have money I might become careless and negligent, believing in a security which does not exist, stressing those values which are illusory and empty. I have no misgivings about the future. In the dark days to come money will be less than ever a protection against evil and suffering.
In the last year or two in Paris I had been hinting to my friends that I would one day give up writing altogether, give it up voluntarily—at the moment when I would feel myself in possession of the greatest power and mastery. The study of Balzac, which was my final work in Paris, had only corroborated a thought which had begun to crystallize in me, namely that the life of the artist, his devotion to art, is the highest and the last phase of egotism in man. There are friends who tell me that I will never stop writing, that I can’t. But I did stop, for a good interval while in Greece, and I know that I can in the future, any time I wish, and for good. I feel under no compulsion to do any particular thing. I feel, on the contrary, a growing liberation, supplemented more and more by a desire to serve the world in the highest possible way. What that way is I have not yet determined, but it seems clear to me that I shall pass from art to life, to exemplify whatever I have mastered through art by my living. I said I felt chastened. It is true that I also felt exalted. But above all I felt a sense of responsibility such as I had never known before. A sense of responsibility towards myself, let me hasten to add. Without tasting the rewards which he had spoken of I had nevertheless enjoyed them in advance, enjoyed them imaginatively, I mean. During all the years that I have been writing I have steeled myself to the idea that I would not really be accepted, at least to my own countrymen, until after my death. Many times, in writing, I have looked over my own shoulder from beyond the grave, more alive to the reactions of those to come than to those of my contemporaries. A good part of my life has, in a way, been lived in the future. With regard to all that vitally concerns me I am really a dead man, alive only to a very few who, like myself, could not wait for the world to catch up with them. I do not say this out of pride or vanity, but with humility not untouched with sadness. Sadness is perhaps hardly the right word either, since I neither regret the course I have followed nor desire things to be any different than they are. I know now what the world is like and knowing I accept it, both the good and the evil. To live creatively, I have discovered, means to live more and more unselfishly, to live more and more into the world, identifying oneself with it and thus influencing it at the core, so to speak. Art, like religion, it now seems to me, is only a preparation, an initiation into the way of life. The goal is liberation, freedom, which means assuming greater responsibility. To continue writing beyond the point of self-realization seems futile and arresting. The mastery of any form of expression should lead inevitably to the final expression—mastery of life. In this realm one is absolutely alone, face to face with the very elements of creation. It is an experiment whose outcome nobody can predict. If it be successful the whole world is affected and in a way never known before. I do not wish to boast, nor do I wish to say that I am yet ready to make such a grave step, but it is in this direction that my mind is set.
The one desire which grows more and more is to give. The very real sense of power and wealth which this entails is also somewhat frightening—because the logic of it seems too utterly simple. It is not until I look about me and realize that the vast majority of my fellow men are desperately trying to hold on to what they possess or to increase their possessions that I begin to understand that the wisdom of giving is not so simple as it seems. Giving and receiving are at bottom one thing, dependent upon whether one lives open or closed. Living openly one becomes a medium, a transmitter; living thus, as a river, one experiences life to the full, flows along with the current of life, and dies in order to live again as an ocean.
I would wander over to the Zapion and stroll about in the dazzling starlight, repeating to myself as if it were an incantation: “you are in another part of the world, in another latitude, you are in Greece, in Greece, do you understand?” It was necessary to repeat the Greece because I had the strange feeling of being at home, of being in a spot so familiar, so altogether like home should be that from looking at it with such intense adoration it had become a new and strange place. For the first time in my life, too, I had met men who were like men ought to be—that is to say, open, frank, natural, spontaneous, warm-hearted. These were the types of men I had expected to meet in my own land when I was growing up to manhood. I never found them. In France I found another order of human beings, a type whom I admired and respected but whom I never felt close to. In every possible way that I can think of Greece presented itself to me as the very center of the universe, the ideal meeting place of man with man in the presence of God. It was the first voyage I had ever made which was wholly satisfactory, in which there was no slightest trace of disillusionment, in which I was offered more than I had expected to find. The last nights in the Zapion, alone, filled with wonderful memories, were like a beautiful Gethsemane. Soon all this would be gone and I would be walking once more the streets of my own city. The prospect no longer filled me with dread. Greece had done something for me which New York, nay, even America itself, could never destroy. Greece had made me free and whole. I felt ready to meet the dragon and to slay him, for in my heart I had already slain him. I walked about as if on velvet, rendering silent homage and thanksgiving to the little band of friends whom I had made in Greece. I love those men, each and every one, for having revealed to me the true proportions of the human being. I love the soil in which they grew, the tree from which they sprang, the light in which they flourished, the goodness, the integrity, the charity which they emanated. They brought me face to face with myself, they cleansed me of hatred and jealousy and envy. And not least of all, they demonstrated by their own example that life can be lived magnificently on any scale, in any clime, under any conditions. To those who think that Greece to-day is of no importance let me say that no greater error could be committed. To-day as of old Greece is of the utmost importance to every man who is seeking to find himself. My experience is not unique. And perhaps I should add that no people in the world are as much in need of what Greece has to offer as the American people. Greece is not merely the antithesis of America, but more, the solution to the ills which plague us. Economically it may seem unimportant, but spiritually Greece is still the mother of nations, the fountain-head of wisdom and inspiration.
On the way back we passed a friend of Durrell’s—without stopping. The greeting impressed me as most nonchalant and casual. “What’s the matter,” I inquired, “are you on the outs with him?” Durrell seemed surprised by my remark. No, he wasn’t on the outs with the fellow—what made me think so? “Well, isn’t it a bit unusual to run into an old friend in an odd corner of the world like this?” I asked. I don’t remember the exact words he used in answer to this but substantially they were these: “What would we do with an Englishman here? They’re bad enough at home. Do you want to spoil our holiday?” His words set me to meditating. In Paris, I recalled, I had never been keen to meet an American. But that was because I considered Paris my home and at home, however mistaken the idea may be, one feels that he has a right to be rude, intolerant and unsociable. But away from home, especially in an utterly strange place, I have always felt good about running into a compatriot, even though he might prove to be an incurable bore. In fact, once out of familiar bounds, boredom and enmity and prejudice usually cease with me. If I were to encounter my worst enemy, in Samarkand, let us say, I am certain I would go up to him and hold out my hand. I would even put up with a little insult and injury in order to win his good graces. I don’t know why, except perhaps that just being alive and breathing in some different part of the world makes enmity and intolerance seem the absurd things which they are. I remember a meeting with a Jew who detested me in America, because he considered me an anti-Semite. We had encountered one another in a railway station in Poland after a lapse of several years. The moment he laid eyes on me his hatred vanished. I not only felt glad to see him again but eager to make amends for having, whether rightly or wrongly, wittingly or unwittingly, inspired his hostility. Had I met him in New York, where we had formerly known each other, it is highly improbable that our reactions would have been the same. The reflection, I admit, is a sad commentary on human limitations. It gives rise to even worse reflections, such as for example, the stupidity which permits rival factions to go on fighting one another even when confronted with a common enemy.
The greatest single impression which Greece made upon me is that it is a man-sized world. Now it is true that France also conveys this impression, and yet there is a difference, a difference which is profound. Greece is the home of the gods; they may have died but their presence still makes itself felt. The gods were of human proportion: they were created out of the human spirit. In France, as elsewhere in the Western world, this link between the human and the divine is broken. The scepticism and paralysis produced by this schism in the very nature of man provides the clue to the inevitable destruction of our present civilization. If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. Much has been said about a new order of life destined to arise on this American continent. It should be borne in mind, however, that not even a beginning has been visioned for at least a thousand years to come. The present way of life, which is America’s, is doomed as surely as is that of Europe. No nation on earth can possibly give birth to a new order of life until a world view is established. We have learned through bitter mistakes that all the peoples of the earth are vitally connected, but we have not made use of that knowledge in an intelligent way. We have seen two world wars and we shall undoubtedly see a third and a fourth, possibly more. There will be no hope of peace until the old order is shattered. The world must become small again as the old Greek world was—small enough to include everybody. Until the very last man is included there will be no real human society. My intelligence tells me that such a condition of life will be a long time in coming, but my intelligence also tells me that nothing short of that will ever satisfy man. Until he has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision. We say erroneously that the Greeks humanized the gods. It is just the contrary. The gods humanized the Greeks. There was a moment when it seemed as if the real significance of life had been grasped, a breathless moment when the destiny of the whole human race was in jeopardy. The moment was lost in the blaze of power with engulfed the intoxicated Greeks. They made mythology of a reality which was too great for their human comprehension. We forget, in our enchantment with the myth, that it is born of reality and is fundamentally no different from any other form of creation, except that it has to do with the very quick of life. We too are creating myths, though we are perhaps not aware of it. But in our myths there is no place for the gods. We are building an abstract, dehumanized world out of the ashes of an illusory materialism. We are proving to ourselves that the universe is empty, a task which is justified by our own empty logic. We are determined to conquer and conquer we shall, but the conquest is death.
People seem astounded and enthralled when I speak of the effect which this visit to Greece produced upon me. They say they envy me and that they wish they could one day go there themselves. Why don’t they? Because nobody can enjoy the experience he desires until he is ready for it. People seldom mean what they say. Any one who says he is burning to do something other than he is doing or to be somewhere else than he is is lying to himself. To desire is not merely to wish. To desire is to become that which one essentially is. Some men, reading this, will inevitably realize that there is nothing to do but act out their desires. A line of Maeterlinck’s concerning truth and action altered my whole conception of life. It took me twenty-five years to fully awaken to the meaning of his phrase. Other men are quicker to coordinate vision and action. But the point is that in Greece I finally achieved that coordination. I became deflated, restored to proper human proportions, ready to accept my lot and prepared to give of all that I have received. Standing in Agamemnon’s tomb I went through a veritable rebirth. I don’t mind in the least what people think or say when they read such a statement. I have no desire to convert any one to my way of thinking. I know now that any influence I may have upon the world will be a result of the example I set and not because of my words. I give this record of my journey not as a contribution to human knowledge, because my knowledge is small and of little account, but as a contribution to human experience. Errors of one sort and another there undoubtedly are in this account but the truth is that something happened to me and that I have given as truthfully as I know how.
There are men who are so full, so rich, who give themselves so completely that each time you take leave of them you feel that it is absolutely of no consequence whether the parting is for a day or forever. They come to you brimming over and they fill you to overflowing. They ask nothing of you except that you participate in their superabundant joy of living. They never inquire which side of the fence you are on because the world they inhabit has no fence. They make themselves invulnerable by habitually exposing themselves to every danger. They grow more heroic in the measure that they reveal their weaknesses. Certainly in those endless and seemingly fabulous stories which Katsimbalis was in the habit of recounting there must have been a good element of fancy and distortion, yet even if truth was occasionally sacrificed to reality the man behind the story only succeeded thereby in revealing more faithfully and thoroughly his human image.
During the time I knew him Katsimbalis’ life was relatively quiet and unadventurous. But the most trivial incident, if it happened to Katsimbalis, had a way of blossoming into a great event. It might be nothing more than that he had picked a flower by the roadside on his way home. But when he had done with the story that flower, humble though it might be, would become the most wonderful flower that ever a man had picked. That flower would remain in the memory of the listener as the flower which Katsimbalis had picked; it would become unique, not because there was anything in the least extraordinary about it, but because Katsimbalis had immortalized it by noticing it, because he had put into that flower all that he thought and felt about flowers, which is like saying—a universe.