‘Sacred Awe’ – on discovering ‘Zorba the Greek’ late in middle age

15 Mar 2023

For me, Kazantzakis was not only a complicated name, but a portent of something more exotic and unfathomable. Mythic and modern. I left him alone. Now in middle age, ‘Zorba the Greek’ came back to my attention at the right time.

Arriving at the front door of an old book is often the last act in a sequence of accidental events. A case in point: a holiday that exposes you to an unfamiliar culture or geography may awaken interest in its great writers, unexpectedly bringing to life names that for decades have lain dormant at the back of your awareness. Suddenly they become relevant and alluring.

That’s what led me to Alexis Zorba, the larger-than-life character who occupies centre stage in a novel that sadly does not stand alongside other “classics” in bookstores like Exclusive Books.

It should. I had to order it to bring it back to South Africa’s shores.

Once it’s safely stowed, getting through a classic is often the start of another journey. But, as I realised halfway through reading Zorba, the challenge is not to “get through it”, but to delve into it.

To linger.

Long.

In this respect it’s a little like walking in the mountains. There’s a lot of trepidation before you start. Then the path can be full of delight and danger, light and darkness. You may get lost. You might even abandon the path and scurry home to a place of familiarity and comfort.

But if you do, you lose.

Reading Zorba the Greek, first published in 1946, by Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis became such an unexpected journey for me. Over the years I have heard of this iconic book, but in my youth my interest in European literature of the post-World War 2 period was mainly in the existentialists: notably Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett. These men combined a revolutionary rejection of capitalist society with my own immature but enduring sense of alienation from it.

By contrast Kazantzakis seemed not only a complicated name, but a portent of something more exotic and unfathomable. Simultaneously mythic and modern.

I left him alone.

Now in middle age, Zorba the Greek has found his way back to me at the right time. With hindsight I’m glad I didn’t read it then. It’s the sort of book you shouldn’t study as a student of English literature. The best appreciation of its mastery needs half a lifetime behind you, and the willingness to read slowly.

‘How simple and frugal a thing is happiness’

It’s a simple story.

A young intellectual stranded – by choice – on an island – Crete – that is not only beautiful, but also ideal for its positioning between civilisations and their cultures. Halfway between Europe and Africa, almost in the Levant; “to the South, an expanse of sea, still angry and roaring as it came rushing from Africa to bite the coast of Crete”.

A few hundred years ago Crete really was the centre of the universe. As the narrator says: “On this Cretan soil, every stone, every tree has its tragic history.”

(Early on Kazantzakis singles out “a great fig tree, with a twisted double trunk” – The Fig Tree of Our Young Lady – which made me wonder whether Elif Shafak’s tale of a fig tree on another not-too-faraway Mediterranean island was just a coincidence.)

Soon after arriving from Greece as Zorba and the narrator discover the island, there’s a playful allusion to The Tempest. But Crete is not an uninhabited island. In fact it provides the story with a specimen village and most importantly a stage for Zorba (a kind of dressed-up Caliban) to occupy the unnamed first-person narrator’s meandering meaning-of-life thoughts.

On this stage develops a picaresque of two very different minds, an Odyssey without really going anywhere, an evolution through inertia. Given the narrator’s proclivity towards Buddhism it’s a vindication of the “Don’t just do something, stand still” principle.

Eventually, after an almost Joycean trawl through Zorba’s encounters with women, death, war and the narrator’s vicarious enjoyment of them, the book ends soon after a tragi-comic failure by the two heroes to complete their mission to mine lignite on Crete. After a dance made famous by Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates in the 1964 film of the novel, with music composed by Mikis Theodorakis (another Greek native), they depart the island, go their separate ways, and news one day reaches the narrator of Zorba’s death in a village of Serbia and his wish that the narrator inherit his santuri: “Tell him that whatever I have done, I have no regrets. Tell him I hope he is well and that it’s about time he showed a bit of sense.”

But in between that moment and the book’s beginning in a cafe on the dockside at Piraeus (the Athenian port where for all time ships – today great hulking ferries with names like Knossos Palace – have departed to Crete and other Aegean islands) Kazantzakis has taken us on a wonderful journey exploring the meaning of life, our place on the planet – and its beauty and friendship.

The book has echoes of Waiting for Godot but whereas Beckett built his exploration of the meaning of life around a single tree and nothingness, Kazantzakis builds it around the richness of the human experience and the meaning of everythingness. Ironically both paths lead to a similar conclusion about the futility of homo sapiens’ struggles to invest ourselves with meaning. While the book’s narrator is “contaminated by blasted books”, Zorba’s philosophy can be summed up as don’t think, don’t question, don’t write or read, just be and do. Zorba’s mere presence is a constant challenge:

“I closed the book and looked at the sea. I must free myself of all these phantoms, I thought, Buddhas, Gods, Motherlands, Ideas… Woe to him who cannot free himself from Buddhas, Gods, Motherlands and Ideas.”

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As with all great literature, some of the questions the book throws up have a timeless but uncanny immediacy.

Zorba, the philosopher, for example, asks: “What sort of madness comes over us to make us throw ourselves on another man, when he’s done nothing to us, and bite him, tear his ear out, run him through his guts – and all the time calling on the Almighty to help us!”

Others are more existential.

Thus for me, reading Zorba during a time of gathering darkness was a chance to get out into the light. Our world is beset by many wars, declared and undeclared, in no small part because we have still failed to find the equilibrium and equality that prescient poets have for so long constructed their poems, plays and novels around.

The great comeuppance is now upon us.

Interspersed with vignettes, village idiots, unrequited widows, a murder and Dame Quicklys, the book is full of deep philosophical interrogation, culminating in a non-meeting of minds. Zorba tries to persuade the narrator to stop agonising over Words and “the balderdash of books” and just live. Like me, he can’t.

“I tried to make my companion understand what I meant by the Sacred Awe.

‘We are little grubs, Zorba, minute grubs on the small leaf of a tremendous tree. This small leaf is the earth. The other leaves are the stars that you see moving at night. We make our way on this little leaf examining it anxiously and carefully. We smell it; it smells good or bad to us. We taste it and find it eatable. We beat on it and it cries out like a living thing.

‘Some men, the more intrepid ones, reach the edge of the leaf. From there we stretch out, gazing into chaos. We guess what a frightening abyss lies beneath us. In the distance we can hear the noise of the other leaves of the tremendous tree, we feel the sap rising from the roots to our leaf and our hearts swell. Bent thus over the awe-inspiring abyss, with all our bodies and all our souls, we tremble with terror. From that moment begins…’

“I stopped. I wanted to say ‘from that moment begins poetry’, but Zorba would not have understood. I stopped.”

From that moment begins poetry. Indeed. DM/MC

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis is published by Faber and Faber as part of its Faber Modern Classics series. It’s not available in most good bookshops.

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‘How simple and frugal a thing is happiness’