I first met him in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It was almost daybreak and raining. A strong sirocco was blowing the spray from the waves as far as the little café, whose glass doors were shut. The café reeked of brewing sage and human beings whose breath steamed the windows because of the cold outside. Five or six seamen, who had spent the night there, muffled in their brown goat-skin reefer-jackets, were drinking coffee or sage and gazing out of the misty windows at the sea."
Many a morning, when I was still too early for my office near Agio Nicholaos, I would sit in one or the other kafenion along the quayside of Piraeus, drinking my thick Greek coffee and gazing out at the sea, just as Basil had done on that morning he met Zorba the Greek.
It always comes back to me on a grey and rainy morning like this morning. Then I wonder why I ever left Greece, and I dip into my much-read copy of "Zorba the Greek" which is full of Zorba’s practical wisdom and zest for life. Zorba manages to see everything and everybody as a miracle worth celebrating, while at the same time recognising that we're all just sacks of bones and flesh and flaws, and that everything we do is probably meaningless in the end.
I was happy then but I didn't know it. As Basil explains at the beginning of chapter VI: "I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been." [click here]
