On the Unhappiness of Being Greek (3 page)
119
Greek education: a mechanism for the mass forcefeeding of knowledge operated by uneducated, uncultured and underpaid instructors.
120
The problem with Greek education is a teacher problem. Only a personality can shape personalities. Behind every integrated person there is (always) at least one good teacher.
121
While ever the majority of teachers are who they are, education will be memorizing and not cultivation. Learning and not acumen.
122
I always remember the teachers who were terrified of those pupils who had learned how to think.
123
The principle on which Greek education was based was worse than non-existent. It was a contradiction in terms:
Greco-Christian
civilization. Two reciprocally rebutting concepts in one adjective. How characteristic of our inner paradox!
124
Other peoples have religion. We have Orthodox
papades –
priests.
125
The only contact that the Greek Church has had with anything spiritual in the last hundred years was the excommunication of Roidis, Laskaratos
25
and Kazantzakis.
126
In the last century, the Greek Church has – faithfully and devotedly – served many masters. All except the One.
127
Statistical parameters concerning the average Greek (1975): he lives in the most expensive country in Europe – in relation to his salary – has the worst social insurance, the most road accidents, the poorest education system and the lowest book production. (I hope there might be found a country like Portugal to prove me wrong in some of the above.)
128
The worst thing that can be said about the Greek bourgeoisie is that it doesn’t exist.
129
The Greek self-called ‘aristocracy’ are in reality the few real bourgeois – from well-to-do families. The nouveaux-bourgeois are in actual fact European-costumed (and bewildered) peasants. And the few remaining peasants are perhaps the only genuine Greeks.
130
The lack of any system in Greece prevented the proper development of even the class system.
131
The abruptly urbanized peasant is the saddest creature in Greece. His life has completely degenerated. He has lost all his traditional patriarchal background – without having acquired anything in its place. Nor did the Greek bourgeois
class have any tradition of note to offer him – and even if it had, a few thousand bourgeois couldn’t possibly absorb a few million peasants in the space of one generation.
132
And so the urbanized peasant lives in a void. He has no land, no language (I’m coming ‘by via Omonia Square’, as even George Seferis wrote
26
), no religion. He no longer knows how to laugh or cry. Or how to live.
133
Nor even how to die. The most important criterion for the genuineness of a society is the way that it confronts death. In Greece, it’s only in the villages that they still know how to face Charon.
134
If I had to choose the most characteristic symbol of modern Greek cheapness and vulgarity, I’d choose our ridiculous American hearses, with their kitsch crystal lamps. Never was something so serious more debased by its symbol.
135
While half the Greeks were trying to transform Greece into a foreign country, the other half were emigrating.
136
We are one of the few countries that had more emigrants and refugees than inhabitants.
137
Greeks will always seek their homeland in other homelands – and other homelands in their own.
138
Just as a man is burdened by original sin – so a Greek is burdened by his kin.
139
In other countries people have relatives. In Greece they have associates in life (and death).
140
When a Greek doesn’t have kin, he has his ‘mates’.
27
141
They are like his kin in that they are equally unchanging, equally demanding and equally boring.
142
(While ever the kin and the group of chums functioned in a proper social context, they were both genuine and positive. Now the essence has gone and only the convention has remained.)
143
The sexual life of Greek men moves on two levels: the real and the imaginary. The distance between them is great.
144
The sexual life of Greek women also moves on two levels: the real and the commercial. The distance between them is small.
145
The most ingenious entrepreneurial ideas of the Greek tycoons pale before the daily sex-trade activity of the average Greek female.
146
The exploitation of women by men has as its natural consequence the deception of men by women.
147
However, it is the woman-mother who has the final word. Here, using the most subtle weapons (overpowering ‘love’ and ‘guilt’), she takes her revenge. By creating children-slaves or children-revolutionaries.
148
Whereas a Greek man has to struggle to break free of himself, the Greek woman has to wage war to break free of the Greek man. The time for her to struggle with herself comes later.
149
All the method and system missing from our everyday lives and work is concentrated in our secret mission: to destroy as effectively as we can this lovely land allotted to us by fate.
150
The truth is that this land is so beautiful that at times its beauty weighs upon our souls, rather like the shadow of our ancestors. Yet another Greek complex.
151
Somewhere inside us we believe that we don’t deserve to live in such a lovely land. And we try to bring it into line with ‘our own standards’. Our own level. So we cover it with concrete and refuse.
152
Greece never ever dies!
28
(Don’t give up hope: Let’s all keep trying …)
153
The Greek landscape: something between Poussin’s
Les Bergers d’Arcadie
and the Theatre of the Absurd. Today: scenery for tourists.
154
Whatever was fashioned by nature and the ancient Greeks … (Now become one and the same.) And we, a motley troupe, wander about amid a splendid scenery for tragedy.
155
Searching backstage, behind the scenery, for the true face of your land, you discover in terror that it’s not stage-scenery but actual stone and rock. You’re the only thing that’s fake. An actor. A ham!
156
‘Wherever I travel, Greece wounds me.’
29
157
Put Greece in your heart and you’ll suffer cardiac arrest.
30
158
The most piteous thing in the world: ten Greek intellectuals in one room. Each of them trying to make an audience of the others.
159
An intellectual is someone who tries (usually in vain) to put his ideas into practice. A Greek intellectual is someone who tries to find ideas in order to justify what he practices.
160
Intellectual communication in Greece: periodically and consecutively, the transmitters are transformed into receivers so as to congratulate other transmitters (without having read them), so that they too may be eventually transformed into transmitters, etc. Intellectual incest…
161
If you go to a concert, an exhibition, a lecture, you’ve seen them all. That’s them. A thousand? Probably fewer. A closed (vicious) circle of the intellect.
162
Greece is probably the only country where the author pays out of his own pocket to get a book published and then is taxed on ‘income from authorship rights’.
163
The hard-sell by which the promotion of intellectual values takes place in the west is a thousand times
preferable to the smarminess, baseness and favoritism that characterize intellectual life in Greece.
164
(All those members of the National Literary Awards committee who have reached this far in the book deserve praise for their conscientiousness and their diligence…)
165
Better a coolie in olden-day China than an intellectual in Greece.
166
If the intellectuals and artists are the unhappiest people (because with them the gap between desire and reality acquires tragic proportions)…
And if the Greeks are the unhappiest of all peoples…
Then what could be worse than being a Greek intellectual?
167
Let the Greek soul be whatever it will – all except one thing: cheap and anonymous.
168
This is the great danger. So ‘resist!’ as the poet said.
31
But resist in Greek fashion.
169
And the Greek hyperbole and complexes and uncertainty lead to creativity. It’s sleep and lethargy and that sated ‘couldn’t care less’ that you should be afraid of.
170
The Greeks, consumers of happiness … Karaghiozis’ constant dream! But how painful on waking up.
171
Perhaps because the true happiness of the Greek is not the static equilibrium (always temporary anyway) between demand and supply, but life’s dialectic of struggle.
172
We Greeks must be mad. Just as, for the bourgeois, the tragic hero is mad. A ‘great holy madness’
32
is the only true thing we have achieved up to now – whether it succeeded or not.
173
Which is why many liked the struggle itself more than the goal of the struggle.
174
We all seek happiness. Yet if people ever succeed in becoming completely reconciled with reality, the – tragic and struggling – Greek spirit will have been lost.
175
Reconciliation with reality means either the (momentary) overcoming or ignorance of reality. Benumbing and forgetting. But the limits always exist. Inexorably.
176
‘And what about death, comrade?’
33
Indeed, comrades, peoples of the world, what about death?
177
For three thousand years, the Greeks have worshipped life. From Homer to Elytis.
34
178
‘To live and gaze upon the sun’s light’.
35
179
No promise of any future life could ever compensate a Greek for the loss of the earthly paradise. No religion could ever reconcile him with death … His transcendentalism was always within this world. Only the ‘now’ has the value of ‘forever’.
180
The ultimate Greek tragedy: to love life more than you can bear. Greek hyperbole in its most extreme form. And the extreme unhappiness of the Greek.
181
Greek pessimism is created by an excessive affirmation of life and not by its renunciation. By the inability to reconcile yourself with life’s finiteness.
182
All those who loved this land died young, either suicides or mad.
183
Greece is a cruel mistress.
184
Will this people ever find its face? Or is its true face a contradiction?
185
The face of Greece: ‘of which so many aspects are apparent and so many are concealed’.
36
Better so. Because, perhaps, it would be impossible to gaze upon it entirely. The light would dazzle you. The ‘angelic and black light’.
37
186
The Greek light. A great respite and a deadly weapon. (‘In the shining light … destroy us.’
38
) Few dare to look at it. (And for this reason, always so many obscurantists in this country.)
187
All harsh shadow and light, this land. And our souls, too, harsh shadow and light. Dissenting and opposing.
188
A Greek: a strange, absurd, tragic moment in the history of humanity.
189
As God is my witness: nothing have I loved more than this land.
190
Of course, one could also write a book entitled:
On the Happiness of Being Greek.
191
Because this happiness exists (who would dare to deny it?).
192
So there you are: in writing about unhappiness, I’ve also been writing about happiness.
193
About the happiness of the unhappiness of being Greek.
Athens 1975
People who enjoy reading this book are probably not Greek. For a Greek this book is painful. He may smile at some aphorisms, even laugh sometimes, but closing it, he will feel, well … unhappy. It portrays the basic problem of his existence, his urge for more and his inability to cope with less. Conflicts undermine his identity, make him uncertain and changeable. He is divided between his glorious past and his meager present, between his Eastern mentality and his European aspiration – torn asunder by forces of tradition (like the Orthodox Church) and modernity. His is a difficult fate.
This book is not a humorous collection of aphorisms about the shortcomings of Greeks – but a bitter reflection on their tragic destiny of being split among past and present, north and south, east and west. It is a declaration of love for Greece, the true, the profound Greece – and not the superficial land of myths that Greek themselves have created in order to escape from reality. By no means is it the work of an ‘Anti-Hellene’ but the product of a man who cares deeply for his country, and tries to help his fellow citizens fulfill the Delphic motto: ‘Know thyself.’ Something that can be a painful procedure, if your mentality, education and upbringing have taught you to avoid truth.
Greece’s present predicament is to a large extend the result of all these flaws in the national character. More
emotional and less rational, a Greek must re-think himself in order to survive in the modern world. This book tries to help him on the way.
N. D.
