Report to Grego (26 page)

All this applies as well to the twelve metopes which embellished the temple of Zeus. They represent the twelve feats of Heracles. Even in the shattered, ruinous state in which they were preserved for us and hung here on the museum walls, how deeply they move us, to what proud heights they elevate the mind! Look how Athena, the human intellect, young as yet but full of vigor, stands by the athlete and aids him. In a similar way, a short while earlier, she must have leaped from the Acropolis to Marathon and Salamis in order to help the Greeks. Further along on the metopes she is seated upon a rock, a little fatigued from her efforts, but proud. Look how she gazes at the athlete as he returns in triumph and offers her the birds of Stymphalus as spoils! Still a little further along, see how tenderly she lifts her hand as, standing behind him, she helps him support the weight of the world.

Though the artist surely wished to hymn the Greeks of his own time, he transferred the praise respectfully to Heracles, the great ancestor and racial chieftain. The hymn seems to be saying, We of this generation did not attain the victory, it was attained by the genius of the race. It was attained by our forebear the obstinate,
resolute athlete. Thus symbolically formulated, the hymn expands still further until it embraces the entire species of free man. We Greeks did not attain the victory, it says; it was attained not by our race alone, but by every man who, advancing from exploit to exploit, struggled to conquer beasts, barbarians, and death.

I passed through the museum door and walked a little way onto the pine-shaded patio. Here I was seized by sudden despondency. Would we moderns, I wondered, ever in our turn achieve the balance and the serene, heroic vision of the ancient Greeks? Every pilgrim, after he disengages himself from this Olympic dream, after he emerges through the museum door and faces the sun of our own day, surely, and with anguish, must pose this basic question to himself. For us Greeks, however, the despondency is twofold, because we consider ourselves descendants of the ancients. Thus, willy-nilly, we give ourselves the duty to equal our great ancestors—and even beyond this, every son's duty to surpass his parents.

H
ow pleasant if the Greek could stroll through his country and not hear stern, angry voices beneath the soil! For the Greek, however, a journey through Greece degenerates into a fascinating and exhausting torture. You stand on a spot of Greek land and find yourself overcome with anguish. It is a deep tomb with layer upon layer of corpses whose varied voices rise and call you—for the voice is the one part of the corpse which remains immortal. Which among all these voices should you choose? Each is a soul, each soul yearns for a body of its own, and your heart listens, greatly troubled. It hesitates to make a decision, because the dearest souls are often not the most deserving.

I remember feeling this terrible, age-old struggle between heart and mind one noontime when I stopped beneath a blossoming oleander along the Eurotas, halfway between Sparta and Mistra. My unrestrainable heart charged forward to resuscitate the pallid, death-sealed body of our Byzantine emperor Constantine Palaeologus; to turn back the wheel of time to January 6, 1449, when here on the heights of Mistra he accepted the short-lived, blood-dyed crown of Byzantium. Innumerable ancestral gasps, innumerable racial yearnings prod us to follow our heart's desire, but the mind callously resists. Turning its face angrily toward Sparta, it wishes to toss the pallid emperor into the Kaiadas of time and cohere to the
callous Spartan youths—for the mind's wish is precisely what this terrible moment demands of us, the terrible moment in which it was our lot to be born. If we want our lives to bear fruit, we must make the decision which harmonizes with the fearsome rhythm of our times.

When a Greek travels through Greece, his journey becomes converted in this fatal way into a laborious search to find his duty. How is he to become worthy of our ancestors? How can he continue his national tradition without disgracing it? A severe, un-silenceable responsibility weighs heavily on his shoulders, on the shoulders of every living Greek. The name itself possesses an invincible, magical force. Every person born in Greece has the duty to continue the eternal Greek legend.

In the modern Greek no region of his homeland calls forth a disinterested quiver of aesthetic appreciation. The region has a name; it is called Marathon, Salamis, Olympia, Thermopylae, Mistra, and it is bound up with a memory: here we were disgraced, there we won glory. All at once the region is transformed into much-wept, wide-roving history, and the Greek pilgrim's entire soul is thrown into turmoil. Each Greek region is so soaked with successes and failures possessing world-wide echoes, so filled with human struggle, that it is elevated into an austere lesson which we cannot escape. It becomes a cry, and our duty is to hear this cry.

Greece's position is truly tragic; on the shoulders of every modern Greek it places a duty at once dangerous and extremely difficult to carry out. We bear an extremely heavy responsibility. New forces are rising from the East, new forces are rising from the West, and Greece, caught as always between the two colliding impulses, once more becomes a whirlpool. Following the tradition of reason and empirical inquiry, the West bounds forward to conquer the world; the East, prodded by frightening subconscious forces, likewise darts forward to conquer the world. Greece is placed in the middle; it is the world's geographical and spiritual crossroads. Once again its duty is to reconcile these two monstrous impulses by finding a synthesis. Will it succeed?

It is a sacred and most bitter fate. At the end of my trip through Greece I was filled with tragic, unexpected questions. Starting with beauty, we had arrived at the agonies of our times and the present-day duty imposed on every Greek. Today, a man who is alive—who
thinks, loves, and struggles—is no longer able to amble in a carefree way, appreciating beauty. The struggle, today, is spreading like a conflagration, and no fire brigade can insure our safety. Every man is struggling and burning along with all humanity. And the Greek nation is struggling and burning more than all the rest. This is its fate.

T
he circle closed. My eyes filled with Greece. It seems to me that my mind ripened in those three months. What were the most precious spoils of this intellectual campaign? I believe they were these: I saw more clearly the historic mission of Greece, placed as it is between East and West; I realized that her supreme achievement is not beauty but the struggle for liberty; I felt Greece's tragic destiny more deeply and also what a heavy duty is imposed on every Greek.

I believe that immediately following my pilgrimage through Greece I was ripe enough to begin the years of maturity. It was not beauty which led the way and ushered me into manhood, it was responsibility.

This was the bitter fruit I held in my hand when, returning after my three-month journey, I entered my father's house.

I
RETURNED
to my father's house. There, amidst my mother's affectionate silence and under my father's strict eye, I would relive my journey, giving some order to its joys and sorrows. I could no longer escape my responsibility; it had acquired a voice within me now. The ground had spoken and the dead had risen, divulging Greece to me as a huge Crete—it too had been struggling for freedom (such was its destiny) since the beginning of time. What then was my duty? It was to work with her, to throw my life and soul into the struggle at her side.

But from whom, from what, was I seeking freedom? These were difficult questions, and I could not answer them. The one thing I did feel was that my role did not lie in going to the mountains, rifle in hand, and warring against the Turks. My weapons were different. In addition, I still could not determine the identity of my enemies. The only thing I saw clearly was that whatever decision I made, I would accomplish my duty as honorably as possible. Of this I was certain—of my perseverance and honor. Of this, and nothing else.

Remember when the archimandrite went to my father and complained that I did not listen to my teachers? My father—I was there and heard—answered him: “I care only if he tells lies or gets a beating. Those two. As for everything else, let him do as he pleases!” Those words embedded themselves deeply in my mind; I believe my life would never have been the same if I had not heard them. In bringing up his son my father seemed to be guided by some dark and unerring instinct, the instinct of a wolf raising its first-born cub.

I did not leave the house. I had no companions now; the Friendly Society had been a juvenile kite, and its parts were scattered to the four winds. Pushing aside the new concerns which had
been tormenting me since my pilgrimage to Greece, I diverted my thoughts by studying the Italian Renaissance and the great souls it had engendered. For I had decided to make a tour of Italy, thereby exhausting the remainder of my father's gift of a year of travel.

Thus, one morning I removed myself again from my family home. My weeping mother asked, “How long will you keep going away? How long?” I wanted to answer (how unfeeling youth is!): As long as I'm alive, Mother; as long as I'm alive. But I restrained myself. I kissed her hand, and the sea carried me off.

To be young and healthy, twenty-five years old; to love no particular person male or female (this would narrow your heart and keep you from loving all things with equal disinterestedness and fervor); to travel on foot, alone, from one end of Italy to the other, with a carpetbag over your shoulder; and for it to be springtime, and then for summer to arrive, and after that autumn and winter laden with fruit and rain—what impudence for man to desire any greater happiness!

I lacked nothing, I believe. The three savage beasts—body, mind, and soul—all exulted similarly; all three were equally contented, their hunger equally appeased. For the entire extent of this honeymoon with my soul I felt, to a greater degree than ever again in my life, that body, mind, and soul are fashioned of the same clay. Only when a person ages or falls into the grips of illness or misfortune do they separate and oppose one another. Sometimes the body wishes to assume command, sometimes the soul raises its own rebellious banner and wishes to flee. And the mind stands by impotently, watching and recording the dissolution. But when a person is young and strong, how united in loving brotherhood these triplets are, how they nurse on the same milk!

I close my eyes. Youth returns; harmony is re-established inside me. The shores and mountains pass freshly before my eyes, and the villages with their slender campaniles and tiny shaded squares—the plane tree, the flowing fountain, the stone benches at the edges and the old men, in the evening, who sit leaning on their sticks conversing quietly: the same things over and over for so many years, so many centuries. The very air around and above them is as old as time. And when I first saw the famous paintings, how my insatiable heart did tremble! I would halt on the threshold
with buckling knees, interminably, until finally my throbbing heart subsided and I was able to bear all that beauty. For beauty, as I correctly divined, is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.

I raced from city to city. Paintings, statues, churches, palaces. What greed, what yearning! My hunger and thirst could not be sated. An amorous breeze kept blowing across my temples. Never again in my later life did I feel such sheer bodily delight, either from women, ideas, or contact with God. Abstract concerns not having overwhelmed me as yet, I found pleasure in seeing, hearing, and touching. The inner world was one with the outer. I touched it; it was warm, and it had the same odor as my body. If it had been given me in that period to create my God, I would have fashioned him with the body of an adolescent—like an ancient Kouros, with thick fuzz on his cheeks, solid knees, slender waist, and holding the world on his shoulders as though it were a calf.

Here in Italy the apple of life was firm and unblemished. Greece was entirely different. My pilgrimage through Greece was often painful because that soil was so excessively near to me, so excessively, my own. Knowing Greece's sufferings so well, I saw them plainly behind her beautiful face and suffered with her. But Italy was foreign soil. It too had its sufferings, but I did not know them, and if I did, they failed to distress me to such an extent. Here, for me, beauty's face had not a single wound, or so I felt.

I was an unsophisticated provincial still covered with adolescent fluff, who for the first time was walking alone and free in a foreign country, and so great was my joy that sometimes, I remember, I felt terror-stricken. For as I well knew, the gods are envious creatures, and it is
hubris
to be happy and to know that you are happy. In order to exorcise their evil eye, I had recourse to comic schemes for diminishing my happiness. I remember being so elated in Florence that I realized the rights accorded to humans had been overstepped. I had to find some way of suffering, so I went and bought a pair of shoes much too narrow for me. I put them on in the morning, and I suffered so much that I could not walk—I hopped about like a crow. All that morning, until midday, I was miserable. But when I changed shoes and went out for a walk in the afternoon, what joy! I strode along weightlessly; I flew. The world became paradise again. I promenaded along the banks of the
Arno, went past the bridges, and climbed up to San Miniato. A cool breeze blew as evening approached, and the people wore robes of gold as they went by in the sun's last rays. The next morning, however, I donned the narrow shoes and was miserable once more. But the gods had no reason to intervene now. I had clearly paid the tribute they exact from men.

Everything was so childishly simple. Not a single problem bothered me; the apple of life had not a single worm inside. Appearances sufficed; I did not seek to discover if anything existed behind them. An artist of ancient Greece once painted a curtain and invited a rival painter to see and judge his work. “Well, draw back the curtain and let me see the picture!” “The curtain is the picture,” was the artist's reply. The curtain of mountains, trees, oceans, and people which I now saw before me, that was the picture, and I was enjoying it with an unadulterated, gluttonous joy.