What does one do on a cold and wintry day when all one wants is to be somewhere else? One reads Henry Miller's "The Colossus of Maroussi", which is unlike anything else ever written about Greece and about life itself.
"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 be silent the whole day, 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." [page 40]
"In Greece one has the desire to bathe in the sky. You want to rid yourself of your clothes, take a running leap and vault into the blue. You want to float in the air like an angel or lie in the grass rigid and enjoy the cataleptic trance. Stone and sky, they marry here. It is the perpetual dawn of man's awakening." [page 153]
"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." [page 22]
"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. And that's how I was --- except that I didn't have the power or the courage to kill myself then and there. It was good, too, that I didn't do myself in because there were even greater moments to come, something beyond bliss even, something which if anyone had tried to describe to me I would probably not have believed." [page 13]
It's a paean to the joys of Greece and to the joys of life which helps to cheer me up as I sit here on this cold and wintry day. As Leonard Cohen, who had a long and abiding love for everything that was Greek but especially for the island of Hydra, wrote, "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be".
P.S. See also Armchair-travelling on a cold day.
