I said nothing. The thought of my old friend suddenly filled me with sorrow and indignation. How I had loved him! In those days of youth’s divine, comic haughtiness when we roamed Kastro’s streets until dawn, with what conviction and vehemence we demolished and rebuilt the world! The walls of our small city constricted us, the ideas we learned from our teachers constricted us, we found it impossible to subside comfortably into man’s customary joys and aspirations. “Let’s smash the frontiers,” we said constantly. Which frontiers we did not know. We simply kept spreading our arms, as though we were suffocating.
Now my friend’s arms were at his side and he found no trouble in breathing. If he still had an unlawful desire left, he was fighting to drown it by smoking a tobaccoless pipe.
“Why did you go to Russia, to do what?” my father asked me on the night of my arrival.
He eyed me furiously, restraining his anger only by force. For years he had been expecting me to open an office and begin touring the villages to act as sponsor in baptisms and weddings. My friends would multiply, and then I would declare my candidacy and be elected to the Boule. But now, instead, he saw me roaming the world. Rumor had it, furthermore, that I wrote books. The last time I’d seen him he had asked me, “What kind of books-fairy tales, love letters, amanédhes? For shame! Eunuchs and monks are the only ones who write. Settle down at long last in your own territory; you’re a man, work at a man’s job.”
Now he regarded me out of the corner of his eye and said, “Maybe you’ve turned Bolshevik on me—is that it? No God, no country, no honor. Forward, dogs, and no holds barred!”
I told myself that this was a good time to explain what was happening in Russia, what kind of a new world was being built there. So I began to relate in simple words how neither rich men nor poor existed in Russia any longer. Everyone worked and everyone ate; there were no masters and serfs now, everyone was a master. A new humanity existed there, a superior morality, a more honorable honor, a new family. Russia had taken the lead and was showing the way; the whole world was going to follow her, so that justice and happiness might finally reign on earth.
I had worked up steam and begun to preach. My father listened in silence. He kept rolling a cigarette, unrolling it, rolling it again, without deciding to light it. I thought to myself, He understands, thank God. Suddenly he raised his arm with irritation and I fell silent.
“All you say is well and good,” he declared, shaking his head. “But what if it really happens?”
In other words: Go ahead, talk, talk—if you think it’s worth the trouble. They’re just words—twaddle—they can’t do any harm. But take care, wretch, you don’t go turning them into action!
Would that I really could have turned those words into action! But I was afraid I could not. In me the fierce strength of my race had evaporated, my great-grandfather’s pirate ship had sunk, action had degenerated into words, blood into ink; instead of holding a lance and waging war, I held a small penholder and wrote. Contact with people annoyed me, diminished my strength and love. Only when I was by myself and contemplating man’s destiny did my heart overflow with compassion and hope.
Upon returning from the world-engendering Soviet laboratory, however, I gathered up courage. Now I said to myself, Man can conquer his incompetence and imperfections, can’t he? Of course he can! Shame on me then to sit passively and accept what nature has given me. I shall rebel!
And just precisely at the instant I needed him, a rich uncle came along and gave me a sum to have me stop wandering shiftlessly around the world, as he put it, and instead apply myself zealously to my work, open a law office, be elected to the Boule, perhaps one day even be asked to head a ministry, and thus glorify my ancestral name. After all, I was the first of our lineage to be educated, the first to open a book and read. Therefore, I had a duty to carry out.
I turned this over and over in my mind. No, I still could not shut myself up in an office—I was suffocating. I would find some other way to enter the practical life. But which? I had no idea. I recruited workers in my imagination. Together, we would harness ourselves to a job, eat the same food, wear the same clothes. There would be no boss and workers; the workers would not be workers but co-workers, with exactly the same rights as myself.
Having just returned from Russia, I too wished to make this microscopic attempt to emerge from my ivory tower and work with human beings.
Just then—as if fate was in a mood to play games—I made the acquaintance of an elderly mineworker named Alexis Zorba.
29
ZORBA
MY LIFE’S GREATEST BENEFACTORS have been journeys and dreams. Very few people, living or dead, have aided my struggle. If, however, I wished to designate which people left their traces embedded most deeply in my soul, I would perhaps designate Homer, Buddha, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Zorba. The first, for me, was the peaceful, brilliantly luminous eye, like the sun’s disk, which illuminated the entire universe with its redemptive splendor; Buddha, the bottomless jet-dark eye in which the world drowned and was delivered. Bergson relieved me of various unsolved philosophical problems which tormented me in my early youth; Nietzsche enriched me with new anguishes and instructed me how to transform misfortune, bitterness, and uncertainty into pride; Zorba taught me to love life and have no fear of death.
If it had been a question in my lifetime of choosing a spiritual guide, a guru as the Hindus say, a father as say the monks at Mount Athos, surely I would have chosen Zorba. For he had just what a quill-driver needs for deliverance: the primordial glance which seizes its nourishment arrow-like from on high; the creative artlessness, renewed each morning, which enabled him to see all things constantly as though for the first time, and to bequeath virginity to the eternal quotidian elements of air, ocean, fire, woman, and bread; the sureness of hand, freshness of heart, the gallant daring to tease his own soul, as though inside him he had a force superior to the soul; finally, the savage bubbling laugh from a deep, deep wellspring deeper than the bowels of man, a laugh which at critical moments spurted redemptively from Zorba’s elderly breast, spurted and was able to demolish (did demolish) all the barriers—morality, religion, homeland—which that wretched poltroon, man, has erected around him in order to hobble with full security through his miserable smidgen of life.
When I think what nourishment books and teachers fed me for so many years in an attempt to satisfy a famished soul, and of the solid, leonine brain fed me by Zorba for just a few months, I find it difficult to endure my bitterness and indignation. How can I avoid heartfelt excitement when I recall the words he spoke to me, the dances he danced for me, the santir he played for me on that Cretan shore where we spent six months digging with a mass of laborers, supposedly to find lignite? We both knew full well that this practical aim was dust to mislead the eyes of the world. We waited anxiously for the sun to set and the laborers to stop work, so that the two of us could lay our dinner out on the beach, eat our delicious peasant meal, drink our tart Cretan wine, and begin to talk.
I rarely opened my mouth. What could an “intellectual” say to an ogre? I listened to him tell me about his village on the flanks of Mount Olympus, about snow, wolves, komitadjis, Saint Sophia, lignite, women, God, patriotism, death—and when words became too constricting for him and he felt suffocated, he leaped to his feet and began to dance on the shore’s coarse pebbles. Spare, vigorous, with a tall, erect body and small circular eyes like a bird’s, he danced with inclined head, and shrieked and stamped his big feet on the shore line, sprinkling my face with sea water.
If I had listened to his voice—not his voice, his cry—my life would have acquired value. I would have experienced with blood, flesh, and bone what I now ponder like a hashish-smoker and effectuate with paper and ink. But I did not dare. I watched Zorba dance and whinny in the middle of the night, heard him call me to leap up in my own turn from the agreeable haven of prudence and custom in order to depart with him on great voyages from which there was no return, and there I sat,
motionless and shivering.
I have been ashamed many times in my life because I caught my soul not daring to do what supreme folly—the essence of life—called me to do. But I never felt so ashamed of my soul as I did in front of Zorba.
The lignite enterprise went to the devil. Laughing, playing, conversing, Zorba and I did all we could to reach the catastrophe. We did not dig to find lignite; that was a pretext meant for the naïve and prudent—“to keep them from barraging us with lemon rinds,” Zorba always said, bursting into laughter. “As for us, boss” (he used to call me boss and laugh), “we have other aims, great ones.”
“What are they, Zorba?” I asked him.
“It seems we’re digging to see what devils we have inside us.”
In no time we devoured what my poor dear of an uncle had given me to open (supposedly) an office. Dismissing the workmen, we roasted a lamb, filled a little barrel with wine, spread our meal at the water’s edge, the site of our quarry, and began to eat and drink. Zorba took up his santir. Stretching his elderly throat, he commenced an amané. We ate and drank. I can never remember being in such good spirits. “God forgive the dear departed,” we shouted. “God forgive the late enterprise—and long life to ourselves! To the devil with lignite!”
We parted at dawn. I headed for paper and ink again, incurably wounded by the bloody dart which, not knowing what else to call it, we term spirit; he went north and landed in Serbia, near Skopje, at a mountain where it seems he unearthed a rich vein of magnesite, wrapped various nabobs around his little finger, purchased tools, recruited workers, and began to open galleries in the earth again. He dynamited boulders, constructed roads, brought water, built a house and, succulent old man that he was, married a pretty, fun-loving widow named Lyuba, and had a child by her.
Whereupon one day I received a telegram: “Found most beautiful green stone. Come immediately. Zorba.” It was the period when the first distant rumblings of the Second World War could be heard, the tempest which had already begun to drive down upon the earth. Millions of people trembled as they saw the oncoming hunger, slaughter, and madness. All the devils in men were awake and thirsting for blood.
It was in those venomous days that I received Zorba’s telegram. At first I grew angry. The world was perishing; honor, man’s soul, life itself, were in danger, and here of all things was a telegram asking me to set out and travel a thousand miles to see a beautiful green stone! Beauty be damned! I said. It is heartless, and cares nothing for man’s pain.
But I suddenly felt afraid. My anger had already evaporated; now I had the horrible feeling that this inhuman cry of Zorba’s corresponded to another inhuman cry inside my own being. A savage vulture within me was beating its wings in order to leave. But I did not leave; once more I did not dare. I did not depart to make the journey, did not follow the divinely brutal inner cry, did not perform a valiant, preposterous act. Following the cold human voice of reason, I took up my pen and wrote to Zorba, explaining to him . . .
He answered me: “Forgive me for saying so, boss, but you’re just a pen-pusher. Here you had the chance of a lifetime to see a beautiful green stone, and you didn’t see it. By God, sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I sit down and ask myself, Is there a hell or isn’t there? But yesterday when I received your letter, I said, There sure is a hell for certain pen-pushers!”
Years went by, long, terrible years in which the times gathered momentum and seemed to go mad, years when geographical frontiers danced and states expanded and contracted like accordions. Zorba and I lost each other in the storm. Now and then, only, I received a brief card from him, from Serbia: “I’m still alive. It’s devilishly cold here, so I had to get married. Turn the card over to see her little mug. Quite a piece, eh? Her belly is a trifle inflated because she’s already getting a little Zorbadhaki ready for me. Her name is Lyuba. The overcoat I’m wearing with the fox-fur collar is part of my wife’s dowry. They’re an odd breed; she also gave me a sow with seven piglets! Love and kisses, Alexis Zorba, ex-widower!”
Another time he sent me an embroidered Montenegrin cap from Serbia. It had a silver bell on its pompon. “Wear it, boss,” he wrote to me, “when you write the hooey you write. I wear the same cap when I work. People laugh. ‘Are you crazy, Zorba?’ they ask. ‘Why do you wear that bell?’ But I chuckle and refuse to answer them. The two of us, boss, we know why we wear the bell.”
Meanwhile, I had harnessed myself again to paper and ink. I had come to know Zorba too late. At this point there was no further salvation for me; I had degenerated into an incurable pen-pusher.
I began to write. But no matter what I wrote—poems, plays, novels—the work always acquired, without conscious effort on my part, a dramatic élan and form—full of mutually clashing forces, struggle, indignation, revolt, the pursuit of a lost equilibrium; full of portents and sparks from the approaching tempest. No matter how much I struggled to give a balanced form to what I wrote, it quickly assumed a vehement dramatic rhythm. In spite of my wishes, the peaceful voice I desired to emit became a cry. That is why I kept finishing one work, finding that it did not unburden me, and desperately beginning another, always with the hope of being able to reconcile the dark and luminous forces which were then in a state of war, and of divining what form their future harmony would take.
Dramatic form makes it possible for creative literature to formulate the unbridled forces of our times and of our souls by incarnating them in the work’s vying heroes. As faithfully and intensely as I could, I attempted to experience the important age in which I happened to be born.
The Chinese have a strange malediction: “I curse you; may you be born in an important age.” We have been born in an important age full of kaleidoscopic experiments, adventures, and clashes, not only between the virtues and the vices, as formerly, but rather—and this is the most tragic of all—between the virtues themselves. The old, recognized virtues have begun to lose their authority; they are no longer able to fulfill the religious, moral, intellectual, and social demands of the contemporary soul. Man’s soul seems to have grown bigger; it cannot fit any longer within the old molds. A pitiless civil war has broken out in the vitals of our age, has broken out, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the vitals of every man abreast of his times—a civil war between the old, formerly omnipotent myth which has vented its strength, yet which fights desperately to regulate our lives a while longer, and the new myth which is battling, still awkwardly and without organization, to govern our souls. That is why every living man is racked today by the dramatic fate of his times.
And the creator most of all. There are certain sensitive lips and fingertips which feel a tingling at a tempest’s approach, as though they were being pricked by thousands of needles. The creator’s lips and fingertips are of this kind. When the creator speaks with such certainty of the tempest which is bearing down upon us, what speaks is not his imagination but the lips and fingertips which have already begun to receive the tempest’s initial sparks. We must reconcile ourselves heroically to the fact that peace, carefree joy, and so-called happiness belong to other ages, past or future, not to our own. Our age has long since entered the constellation of anguish.
In formulating this anguish, however, I was fighting without conscious effort to surpass it and find (or create) a form of deliverance. In what I wrote, I often took my pretext from ancient times and legends, but the substance was modern and living, racked by contemporary problems and present-day agonies.
But I was tormented and enticed less by these agonies than by certain still-indefinite, vacillatory hopes whose countenances I struggled to stabilize, the great hopes which enable us to hold ourselves still erect and to gaze confidently before us, past the tempest, at the destiny of man.
I was troubled by concern not so much for present-day man in his state of decomposition as—this above all—for future man in his state of composition and gestation. I reflected that if today’s creative artist formulated his deepest inner presentiments wi
th integrity, he would aid future man to be born one hour sooner, one drop more integrally.
I kept divining the creator’s responsibility with ever-increasing clarity. Reality, I said to myself, does not exist independent of man, completed and ready; it comes about with man’s collaboration, and is proportionate to man’s worth. If we open a riverbed by writing or acting, reality may flow into that riverbed, into a course it would not have taken had we not intervened. We do not bear the full responsibility, naturally, but we do bear a great part.
Writing may have been a game in other ages, in times of equilibrium. Today it is a grave duty. Its purpose is not to entertain the mind with fairy tales and make it forget, but to proclaim a state of mobilization to all the luminous forces still surviving in our age of transition, and to urge men to do their utmost to surpass the beast.
The heroes in ancient Greek tragedies were no more or less than Dionysus’s scattered limbs, clashing among themselves. They clashed because they were fragments. Each represented only one part of the deity; they were not an intact god. Dionysus, the intact god, stood invisible in the center of the tragedy and governed the story’s birth, development, and catharsis. For the initiated spectator, the god’s scattered limbs, though battling against one another, had already been secretly united and reconciled within him. They had composed the god’s intact body and formed a harmony.
I always considered that in just this way the future harmony must be elevated in today’s tragedy, above the enmity and battle, intact amid the fragmented, antagonistic heroes. This is an extremely difficult task, perhaps one still incapable of achievement. We find ourselves in a moment of universal destruction and creation in which even the most valiant individual attempts are in most cases condemned to miscarry. These miscarriages are fertile, however—not for us, but for those yet to come. They open a road and aid the future to enter.