CHAPTER 7
The Gulf of Corinth
…in bed lying quiet under kisses
Without signature, with all my debts unpaid
I shall recall nights of squinting rain,
Like pig-iron on the hills: bruised
Landscapes of drumming cloud and everywhere
The lack of someone spreading like a stain…
—Lawrence Durrell
A recurring critique of the ethos of modernism is that it fosters alienation from and indifference to the world and a regressive absorption into one's own personal situation. Faced with a macrocosm that is too overwhelming to contemplate and too complex to control, people take refuge in a narcissistic concern for their own survival and the emotional imperatives of the self.1 “To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity.”2 While it may be argued that being selffulfilled is the best guarantee of being able to give support to others, one tends to encounter either the “modern” view that one's “main task in life is to give birth to [oneself], to become what [one] potentially is”3 (the corollary being that submergence in the social is a flight from the self), or the antithetical ‘'traditional’ view that self-sacrifice is our highest calling—the sublimation of personal desires and interests in order to serve God, raise a happy family, or save humankind.
While I do not share Erich Fromm's view that we seek relatedness and union with others because we cannot stand “being alone and separated,” I think he is right in claiming that our own potential unfolds only “in the process of being related.”4 Fromm speaks of this process as a “productive” relationship to the world, and of love as its moral essence. But selfless love is as unproductive as selfish love. “Not only others, but we ourselves are the ‘object’ of our feelings and attitudes; the attitudes toward others and toward ourselves, far from being contradictory, are basically conjunctive.”5
Such heady deliberations were far from my thoughts when I travelled to Greece in the early summer of 2009, but in the weeks that followed they came to speak to the mystery of a long-distance friendship as well as my relationship with my fourteen-year-old daughter Freya. For just as no one exists outside of his or her relations with others, so no time in our lives is separable from other times. “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”6
The south of France, May 1983: It was dusk. I stood for a moment on the stone step while my eyes grew used to the darkness that had already laid claim to the garden. Gnarled wisteria held the portico in its grip. Cypresses along the driveway impaled the sky. I had broken off my conversation with a young woman who was studying anthropology at Cambridge and explained to William Waterfield, our host, that my wife was unwell and that I needed to get back to her. After locating my daughter Heidi,7 who had become attached to William's fox terrier, we set off down the drive. But the anthropology student ran after us. Scribbling her Cambridge address on a scrap of paper, she invited me to write to her and perhaps finish our conversation that way. So began a long-distance friendship that we have sustained to this day. In all this time we met only once, in New York City in 1990. After strolling around Greenwich Village for a couple of hours, we had lunch, then went our separate ways without having overcome the disparity between the intimacy of our letters and the awkwardness we felt in each other's company. That our correspondence continued was, I suspect, not because of any compulsion to “really” get acquainted but because we both felt the need for a trusted stranger with whom confidences could be shared and anxieties confessed without the risk of real-life repercussions. And so we found in letter writing a place to which we could repair, an imaginary companion in whom we could confide, and a mirror in which we could see ourselves more clearly.
In the early summer of 2009, all this changed. Having promised my youngest daughter a trip to a country of her choosing when she graduated from middle school, I found myself on my way to Greece, where Sofka had been living for eight years. When I told Sofka of my plans to take Freya on a tour of the Peloponnese, she insisted we stay a couple of days with her and her family in Athens. It would give us a chance to get to know each other, a litmus test that might finally determine whether our long correspondence was born of a real or an illusory affinity. As I later discovered, Sofka felt as much trepidation about our meeting as I did, for if we found ourselves indifferent to each other, or in deep disagreement, then this would surely spell the end of our letter writing, and we would part, disenchanted and deeply embarrassed to have spent so many years in an epistolary folie à deux, assuming an empathy that had no basis in reality.
At Athens airport, my mind was immediately set at ease by the warmth of Sofka's welcome, her attentiveness to Freya, and her lighthearted attitude toward the strange experiment to which we had decided to subject our friendship.
At first we kept to the safety of small talk. How was our flight? Did we get any sleep? How long had we had to wait in Madrid for our connecting flight to Athens? Freya wanted to know about Sofka's daughters, Anna and Lara, how old they were and whether they lived near the sea. As for me, I found it hard to believe that a mere ten hours had passed since leaving Boston. The offshore islands were swallowed up by mist and cloud as we ascended. We slept through the night and awoke to the new day breaking over the sun-baked, biscuit-colored landscape of central Spain, smudged with slate-gray pools of cloud shadow. But what was most astonishing was the sense that I had passed, like Alice, through a looking glass and entered a world where what had been imagined was suddenly there, before my eyes, and that what had been so vivid yesterday now seemed vague and remote.
Sofka served a late lunch on the terrace. The artistry that came through in her writing, paintings, and driftwood mobiles was evident in the dishes she placed on the table—an oval plate of feta, sprinkled with oregano and interspersed with glistening black Kalamata olives, ceramic bowls of fried aubergine and courgette, juicy tomatoes stuffed with savory rice and pine nuts, snap peas drenched in olive oil, slices of country bread, and tumblers of clear water. How strange to be sitting under the pergola she had described in her letters, in the midst of the rosemary, sage, and thyme she had planted among the rocks and the olive, fig, loquat, and orange trees, with jasmine climbing a dry stone wall. Listening to Sofka's husband Vassilis talk about the recent EU elections or Sofka negotiating with her daughters over household chores, music practice, and how long they could stay out that evening, the uncanny similarity between this household and mine began to sink in, and I felt at home.
That evening, with the sun setting over the Saronic Gulf, Sofka and I finally found time to talk. She asked me what I was writing. It was, perhaps, too early to say. But I already sensed that my visit to Greece would form part of the mosaic, and speak to the theme, I had in mind. I explained this theme as the struggle to strike a balance between one's relationships with others and one's relationship with oneself, of how one may become so absorbed in the lives of others that one's own identity is eclipsed, or so preoccupied by one's own work that one grows negligent of others. “Perhaps you sometimes felt this about our correspondence,” I said. “I know I did—wondering whether, without any face-to-face contact, we risked lapsing into solipsism, each of us construing the other solely from our own perspective.”
“But the amazing thing,” Sofka said, “is that we are face-to-face, and I have absolutely no sense that you are anyone other than the person I have been writing to for all these years.”
I confessed to Sofka that I had always felt anxious about meeting her because of our class difference. Her paternal forebears were Russian aristocrats; mine were English working-class emigrants. Sofka was both irked and amused. “Isn't this an example of what you were just saying? Making me a figment of your imagination, rather than seeing me as I am? Whether or not I was born into a family with relative material wealth, I find that element so much less relevant to my identity than dozens of other factors that affected my childhood. The fact that both my parents battled with depression and alcoholism, for example. In any case, I refuse to think that who we are is decided by our family backgrounds or income. I hate it when people assume that the rich are somehow less human than the poor, and the poor possess moral virtue simply because they are materially impoverished. Why can't we see one another as individuals, as human beings, and not reduce people to abstractions like class, culture, or nationality? These labels only ever seem to apply to the other, and never to oneself! If only people actually met, they would see the artificiality of their constructions. But they don't meet, or won't, and so the constructions are never tested, and become more and more out of touch with reality.”
I had to admit that the problem was mine. As a child I had felt gauche and inferior. I had a dread of appearing foolish, of not measuri ng up, of being rejected. In writing, I felt in control of my situation. Though I might not be accepted as a person, perhaps my literary creations would be. I could hide behind them. They would circulate in the world, but I would not. I could remain apart, safe and unscathed.
Sofka found this hard to believe.
“But what of your fieldwork, your travels. You're always venturing out into the world. No one could be less reclusive than you.”
“I have pushed myself hard. I still do. But, at heart, there is always this small boy, shaking in his shoes, not sure whether or for how long he's going to be able to sustain the conversation, continue the lecture, or go on returning to the field.”
“But everyone's like this, deep down. Everyone gets cold feet. Stage fright. Writer's block. Just look at me!” Sofka asked if I had read Patrick Leigh Fermor. I knew the name but had not read his books.
He was an old friend of Sofka's family. When Sofka's first book was launched in Athens, Leigh Fermor attended, fortified with whiskey and fulminating against the dying of the light.
In 1933, at the age of eighteen and with only a few pounds in his pocket, he had walked from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Having completed this remarkable journey, he settled in Greece, became fluent in the language, and mastered several of its dialects. But before his fame as a travel writer, he was known for his exploits on Crete as a Special Operations Executive officer during the war. Disguised as a shepherd, he lived for two years with a band of Cretan guerillas, holed up in the mountains and leading raids against the occupying Germans. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his role in capturing the commander of German forces on Crete, General Heinrich Kreipe, in 1944.
Leigh Fermor's longtime friend and correspondent, Lady Deborah Devonshire (née Mitford), recalls the event with admiration and affection:
Their prize was bundled into the back of the German official car: Moss8 drove them through a town in the blackout, Paddy sitting on the front seat wearing the general's cap, in case anyone should glance at the occupants. After a four-hour climb on foot to the comparative safety of a cave in the mountains, they spent eighteen days together, moving from one hiding place to another and sharing the only blanket during the freezing nights. When the sun rose on the first morning and lit up the snow on the summit of Mount Ida, the general gazed at the scene and quoted a verse of an ode by Horace. His captor completed the next six stanzas.9When Leigh Fermor had finished, there was a long silence. Then the general said, “Ach so, Herr Major!” “It was very strange,” Leigh Fermor would write years later, “as though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for [the] rest of our time together.”10
Yet this man of the world—this bon vivant and formidable raconteur, fluent in so many languages, fearless and gregarious—was also a man who would periodically retreat to his study “for unusually long and uninterrupted spells”11 and chose to build his house on the isolated southern coast of the Peloponnese. Sofka spoke of his “time of silence,” when Leigh Fermor retreated from the world—to the Abbey of Saint Wandrille, to the monasteries at Solesmes, La Grande Trappe, and Cappadocia. “In the seclusion of a cell—an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual and long solitary walks in the woods—the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.”12
I told Sofka that Leigh Fermor reminded me strongly of Blaise Cendrars, another man who lived life to the limit yet valued solitude.
“How hard it is, though,” Sofka said, “to find the right balance between time to oneself and time for others.
Within days of our departure, she and Vassilis would retreat to Patmos for a few weeks. But already Sofka's list of things to do was growing at an alarming rate—collecting school reports, attending to the terrace plants, fixing the automatic watering system, seeing the girls off to England, and buying dog food. “Thankfully, Patmos always restores some equilibrium,”she said. And she described an austerely beautiful landscape of bare, rocky hills and of small stony beaches, buffeted by summer winds. Simple routines. Life pared down to the essentials. Lying in the shade with a book, and occasionally plucking a plump fig from the trees. Evenings with friends in a beach taverna. And lying at night under the stars, until you felt you were floating free, suspended in space over a dark bowl.13
The next morning Sofka took us to see the Parthenon. I told her that when I lived briefly in Athens, in 1965, I formed a romantic attachment to one of the caryatids on the Erechtheion. Sofka wanted me to show her which one. Though it was only a copy of the original figure (which had been moved to the Acropolis Museum), she was still as beautiful to me as when I first set eyes on her. Her arms and feet had been amputated, perhaps when a Turkish shell almost destroyed the building in 1827. Her face was ruined. But the erosion that had scarred her nose and upper lip had imparted to her a beauty more compelling than if she had remained perfectly unblemished—her supple shoulders, her relaxed stance, the left knee slightly bent, breasts and belly sensuous beneath the folds of an Ionian tunic. Years later I discovered that my experience at the Erechtheion had a literary precedent in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room:
Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and looked rather furtively at the goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on her head. She reminded him of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her, then looked away. He was extraordinarily moved, and with the battered Greek nose in his head…offhe started to walk right up to the top of Mount Hymettus, alone, in the heat.14
I told Sofka that I had often wondered whether Virginia Woolf was writing about an event that actually occurred, which in turn had made me wonder whether it is art that imitates life or life that aspires to the example of art. I suppose I was telling her, obliquely and ineptly, that our letters had, like history, fostered idealizations, and that meeting each other had brought us down to earth, enabling us to recognize each other's flaws and foibles. Just as our humanity had been restored, so the marmoreal perfection of the caryatid had taken on the time-worn features of a human face.
The next day Freya and I left for Delphi. But rather than have us rent a car, Vassilis generously insisted we take his car. He wouldn't need it that week, and it would make getting around much easier for us. So with Google directions and lots of last-minute advice from Sofka and Vassilis, Freya and I found our way onto the highway north, before turning west across the Boeotian plain.
After Livadia the road became more tortuous and I began to wonder whether it would be possible to identify the crossroads where Oedipus, having consulted the oracle at Delphi and learned his terrible fate, found his way blocked by a chariot and in a fit of temper slew the old man who had crossed his path. But I missed the turnoff to Daulia and found instead the road to Distomo.
In the stony landscape of Judas trees and summer calm, it was hard to come to terms with what had happened here in 1944 after a company of Waffen SS was ambushed by partisans. Although the ambush took place several miles from Distomo, the retreating Germans passed some farmers working in their fields. After identifying their village, the German commander ordered his troops into Distomo. Over sixty years later, a survivor recounted to Neni Panourgiá what then came to pass.
They gathered us all in the square across from your father's house. First, through an interpreter, the German asked our names. I don't know how they sorted us, because it wasn't alphabetical, it wasn't by age, it wasn't by height—all of us were there, every boy and man of the district. I was fifteen at the time, but my father was there, too, your uncle Tassos, Spyros, Odysseas, Nikos (both of them, actually), everybody. And then the hooded-one [the baker's apprentice] came and started pointing, without saying anything, not a word.15
Writing of the German reprisals, in which almost all the inhabitants of Distomo were murdered, Neni Panourgiá finds uncanny echoes of the tragedy of Oedipus—another accidental meeting that had fateful consequences, another placid backdrop to barbarism, another occasion for asking how, in the face of such violent events, we may salvage our humanity.16
Though Freya and I were travelling to Delphi, we had planned to stay that night at Galaxidi on the Gulf of Corinth. Galaxidi was Neni's hometown, and since I had not seen her since 1995, when we both worked at Indiana University Bloomington, I was eager to discuss her recently published book on the Greek Left and the terror of the state. But just before leaving Athens, Neni had e-mailed to say that she and her son had arrived from New York feeling unwell and had been diagnosed with swine flu. They were quarantined in their summer house and unable to travel. Given that Neni's book documented the terrible practices of incarceration, isolation, and ostracism that had marked the “fratricidal history”17 of the twentieth century in Greece, I thought it ironic that my friend should be forcibly sequestered, and I pondered the strange parallelism between the concentration camps on the barren and wind-racked islands of MakrÓnisos and YarÓs and the monastic forms of retreat that Sofka had spoken of in Athens.
What one finds most unbearable in life is not exclusion and deprivation as such but being denied any choice in the matter of when and to what extent one keeps to oneself or reduces one's life to the bare necessities. To be called a traitor, a cancer in the body politic, a contaminant, or a vermin is to be transformed into a pathology and one's difference turned into a disease. Accordingly, the violent exclusion of the Left under right-wing governments and military juntas in Greece echoes the extermination of Jews and Gypsies in Nazi camps, the purging of undesirable elements in Stalin's Gulag archipelagos, and the ostracism of Reds and blacks in postwar America. The allencompassing notion of the human becomes a segmentary model, divided into those who are with us and those who are against us. And since this apartheid, in its most reductive form, deploys the antinomy of persons versus things, it must work tirelessly to police these boundaries and ensure that everything and everyone knows its place. A perverse logic then generates the punishments that best fit the crime of transgression. On MakrÓnisos and YarÓs, as in Dachau, men are made to break and carry stone until they became as insensible as the stone they lug up and down hill from daybreak to dark.
The order was always very clear: take those rocks from up there and bring them down here. When the transport was done, the order was reversed: take the stones from down here and move them up there. This would take place all day long, in the heat of summer or the cold of winter, always under a relentless wind, without water, without rest, without shoes, in tattered clothes, on tattered bodies.18
Neni shows how classical myths speak to more recent history. The ageold struggle of city-states to defend themselves against enemies within is echoed in current resistance to foreigners infiltrating the country in search of asylum and work. Similarly, in the myth of Oedipus, we discern contemporary anxieties about whom we may trust and whom we cannot, who is one of us and who is not.19 Neni's reflections spoke directly to the theme of my own book and made me even more sorry that we would not be able to meet in Galaxidi. For her work had given my own a sharper focus, raising anew the question as to whether we can ever know ourselves through reflection, or whether our only knowledge of ourselves is mediated by the responses of others to us, in which case all autobiography is disguised autre-biography.20
Nor was Sisyphus very far from my mind. For who can look at those perched villages, stone walls, and terraces along the Mediterranean littoral without wondering about the lives lost in building them? Even Delphi, for all its bucolic calm, is haunted by such questions—the temples built by the labor of slaves, the heights from which Aesop was thrown to his death.21
We came to Delphi just as the afternoon heat was wearing off. And no less than the first time I came there, the ancient site overwhelmed me. Below me, in the gorge of the Pleistos, a vast olive grove flowed like a river toward the Amphissa plain. Looking up at the craggy, eroded rock face of the Phaedriades and at the handfuls of fleecy cloud that were drifting slowly over the summit, I grew dizzy and had to look down. Thrown by the emotions of returning to a place that meant so much to me, I wanted only to sit still. But Freya had found a stray cat and wanted to find food for it. And so we loitered in the shade of some cypresses while I assured Freya that the cat had chosen Delphi because it was a source of scraps and shelter, and I waited until she was ready to move on.
We climbed to the stadium where a cool breeze stirred in the pines. Freya's sandals scuffed the gravelly ground. My heartbeat slowed. I could hear the murmur of traffic on the mountain road, the lisp of a bird, the stitch of cicadas—and then, silence.
I told Freya that I had come there many years ago with Pauline (my first wife) and Heidi (my firstborn daughter), and that it meant a lot to me to have returned with her. Freya said she would also come back, but not until she had seen lots of others places in the world. But when she did return, it would be with her own daughter, perhaps, and she would tell her daughter how she once came to Delphi with me.
Such is one's afterlife, I thought. We think of it as something for ourselves—some form of personal immortality. But why should we assume that the question of the hereafter must always be answered with reference to ourselves? For what really matters is what we give to others, what they feel about us, and how their lives are made more fulfilling, perhaps, because of us. Only in them do we live on.22
At the museum, I stood before the stone omphalos with its bas-relief of navelwort like a knotted enclosing net. This was the stone that Rhea wrapped in swaddling clothes so that her brother Cronus would eat the stone instead of their son Zeus, whose siblings had all been eaten alive by their father. Zeus later set up at Delphi the stone that Cronus had swallowed and disgorged, where it was anointed with oil and strands of unwoven wool offered upon it.23 But if Delphi is associated with the birth of time—the intercourse of men and women, the cycle of the seasons, the succession of human generations, and the passage of history—then it is also a place of nostalgic longing for the body of a land or a loved one from which we have been separated by aging, exile, or death. In returning to Delphi, was I unconsciously echoing an age-old pilgrimage through the labyrinth of this world to a place where one might overcome one's sense of solitude and the oppression of chronometric time?24
From Delphi, we drove to Galaxidi, where we found a guesthouse a mile from town, overlooking the Gulf of Corinth. That evening, in a small backstreet taverna, we shared a simple meal of Greek salad, country bread, tzatziki, and marinated octopus that Freya naturally wanted me to share with the street cats, all of whom resembled the stray at Delphi. Back at Zoe's Guest House, our hostess spoke of her tearful departure from Galaxidi when she was eight, and of years in Minnesota repining for Greece. From the day she returned home, she has never wanted to be anywhere else, she said. And as if her early childhood and the historical heyday of Galaxidi were intimately connected, she described the transformation of the port into a tourist town. When steamships took over the seas, Galaxidi fell into decline. But now the oaks, which were felled for the building and for the repair of ships, are regenerating everywhere, Zoe said, with evident satisfaction. And as she pointed them out to me on the surrounding hills, it was clear that she was telling me something of her own life story.
We remained at Zoe's for two days, and in that time I was constantly reminded of my own homeland—the sea-battered shingle beaches near Wellington, the Seaward Kaikouras on the southern horizon, the dark, windadzed ocean glimpsed through pines, the dun-colored hills of Makara, Banks Peninsular, the Cardrona Valley—and I wondered whether the Greeks who wound up in Wellington ever recognized these same affinities and felt less homesick because of them.
All day observing the altering light,
the different depths of blue, the sea's
dependency on sky for how it seems,
and remembering you as an island
I confused with “thought,” where
the stiffwind turns the olive leaves,
silvering the drab green river of the grove.
There's a village across the gulf from me,
high on the mountainside, as if
rough dice have been roughly thrown.
The church is a doubtful sanctuary.
At night it is a dying fire, or visits us
in ashen dreams—the places
we were born but cast out from.
like stones down a hill that proved
to be stonier. So in old age find
ourselves like Sisyphus lugging them back
to the uphill shuttered houses
we started from, iron kettles, wooden
stirring spoons, sieves and scales
hanging where our mothers left off work
to worry themselves to death
over what would become of us,
while our fathers played backgammon
and sipped the dregs of coffee in a local bar,
inhaling the smell of fig and jasmine for the final time,
or felt the breeze across the gulf, dry
with sage and pine and wild anemone,
those same hills that now revive
the thought of forests,
though no white barquentines enter
Galaxidi now, nor mules haul
the hard green harvest to the olive press.
Only I seem blessed, a stranger
who does not need to work, watching
cloud shadow move on the arid hill,
or watering a red geranium in a jar
on a whitewashed windowsill.25
On the ferry from Agios Nicholaos to Aegio, Freya plugged into her iPod while I scribbled notes. There was only a handful of passengers. As the boat juddered and rattled its way across the gulf, I wrote of the sea lacerated by a dry, blustering wind from the west and of headlands studded with hardy plants, reaching for metaphors for my own liminal life.
To travel is to come as close to utopia as is humanly possible, for you never really arrive at the place you set out for, but pass through indeterminate zones of which you have no real knowledge and in which you have no real place. Leaving Boston, my American life had been instantly eclipsed. Within hours it seemed like a previous incarnation. Greece claimed me utterly, but like my friendship with Sofka it was a transitory possession that, I feared, would become a blur as swiftly as the headland behind us had dropped into the sea. Sofka had spoken of her own uncertainties in the first few years after she made Athens her home: feeling “out of kilter, floundering between the different versions of ‘my’ Greece, and looking suspiciously (and humiliatingly) like the foreign wives I used to pity with condescension in my student days.” And then, movingly, she describes the moment when the balance shifted and she felt a sea change. It was her birthday. Her daughters surprised her by singing “Happy Birthday” in Greek. “It marked a change of gear,” she said. “The children were sweeping me along with them as they became Greek. I realized that this would change me too.”26
I admired Sofka's ability to allow this metamorphosis to happen, her openness to being swept away from herself into the dark-blue Aegean of a new life. And I thought of her on a day when the wind had whipped up the sea off the cove where she swam every day. Torn by which way to go, frustrated and furious, the broken swell swept into the cove in a foment of foam. But Sofka walked into the maelstrom with Freya, undaunted, beside her, and both struck out strongly into the turbulent waters, leaving me fainthearted on the beach.
When I later broached with Sofka the question of risk, she reminded me that she would never take risks with the children. This was why she chose to swim in “her” small bay rather than along the coast. “But haven't we taken a risk, gambling on having something to say to each other after years of letter writing? Anyway, what would life be if we took no chances? My father took lots of risks, with himself and his family—taking us out in boats in treacherous Hebridean weather, letting us hitchhike, leaving us to fend for ourselves, dragging us up mountains until we wept. Yet I wouldn't be without those experiences. And I took a huge risk when I went to live with Vassilis in Moscow after what could have been just a summer romance. The potential for humiliation was enormous—arriving with my suitcases to start a new life in a new country with a man I'd only known for four weeks.”
Though I agreed with Sofka about nothing ventured, nothing gained, I was ill-prepared for the risks one runs on the highways of Greece, with cars crossing the double line and coming toward you at 90 mph, or honking impatiently until you pull over and let them pass. It was on such a road, lined with oleanders, that Vassilis's father had been killed by a driver veering onto the wrong side of the road. And every few miles I passed roadside shrines containing icons, oil lamps, incense, and plastic flowers—intimations of a view of freedom in which one refuses to buckle up or treats central government with scorn, as if the gods alone determine our fate.
When I saw signs for Nemea, I left the highway, hoping to find the valley of which Lawrence Durrell had written so lyrically, and perhaps a quiet place to stay. But we ended the day in a windowless hotel in Nafplion, where I tried to lift Freya's spirits by telling her of the Argonauts who sailed from there, and I promised her that we would find a “really nice hotel” in Epidauros.
When Henry Miller came to Epidauros in the late spring of 1940, Europe was at war. Yet Miller experienced here a peace that passed all understanding, “the peace of the heart, which comes with surrender.”27 As Miller was recounting his epiphany in the Peloponnese, George Orwell was writing his critique of Miller's passivism, asking how anyone in his right mind could celebrate quietism in the face of fascism. And he likened Miller to Jonah, whose refuge in the belly of a whale was a kind of infantile or narcissistic regression.28 Yet despite his activism, Orwell begrudged Miller his equanimity in the face of the dark age that was threatening to engulf Europe, his refusal to participate in the madness around him. “To be free,” writes Miller, “as I knew myself to be, is to realize that all conquest is in vain, even the conquest of self, which is the last act of egoism.”29
As I climbed the worn stone steps of the theatre with my daughter, spots of rain fell from the clear-blue sky, like tears for someone I loved, who came here once in the secret hope that she might be healed. Sitting with Freya in one of the upper rows, looking out over a distant olive grove and intersecting hills, I mentioned to her my last visit with Pauline, and told her that people had come to Epidauros for centuries to be cured of their afflictions. Though the excavated temple of Asclepius, the hospice, and therapeutic facilities were, for Freya, “just stones,” they reminded me of the poignancy of our struggle to shore ourselves up against ruin. Given that everyone dies, every civilization sinks, and every good work gets forgotten, is it any wonder that we waver between fighting for our lives or fatalistically giving in to death? When Pauline first fell ill with cancer, she did everything possible to seek remission. Stricken with an unrelated cancer ten years later, she placed her faith not in a medical cure but in attaining inner peace. I have lost count of the times I have, since her death, gone back to the last entries in her journal, trying to divine what moved her to make the decision she did. In nine mantras she summed up her vision, and perhaps left her loved ones a key to how they might understand her death.
The truth shall set you free.
Look on all things with an equal eye.
Make of pain a koan.
The real you is spirit. The other you is an aberration—not to be given credence!
So all one has to do is walk in the spirit.
To become strong, you must be filled with strength—do this by opening up constantly.
Enjoy the world aright! Come into your birthright.
No change without suffering.
Forget the self—it is the cause of all one's ills. Look above—BE FREE!
Though I have doubted the wisdom of some of these lines, they helped restore me to life. And I still wrestle with the question of when one should yield and when one should fight, and how one decides between a time to keep silence and a time to speak.
When I first came to Epidauros, I didn't know what to expect. I remember walking through a row of pines and suddenly it was there, outstretched before me like open arms. Now I felt the same yielding, as if I were one with the stone bowl and its surrounding landscape of pines and cypresses. How is it that a place can heal, like the touch of hands? In Athens, Sofka had told me of a physiotherapist who helped her regain movement in her wrist after she broke it in a fall and suffered ancillary nerve damage. Even before the therapist touched her, she trusted him; she placed herself in his hands. But how can one give oneself up to a landscape? How can it inspire trust or wreak changes in our bodies and our minds? Is it that our encounters with the human world have been so bruising that withdrawal from this world is our only hope of restoration? Or is it that we find in the eternal round of the seasons, the flowering of perennial plants, a natural spring, or a snake's ability to shed and renew its skin chthonic metaphors for our own renewal?
At our hotel that afternoon, we learned that Michael Jackson had died of a heart attack. Freya was deeply saddened. She wanted to know why I was not also filled with sorrow at the death of my namesake. I thought of time as an echo chamber, a hall of distorting mirrors. I remembered my hand clap in the ancient amphitheatre, magnified, almost metallically, around the stone bowl.
Next morning I set off alone to the small theatre of Demos. The crowing of a rooster took me back to a village in Sierra Leone, the muffled cor coro coo recalled a ring-dove in Menton, the sound of water flowing down through the orange grove made me remember Mexico, and the ching of a cold chisel brought back to mind lines I wrote when I visited Epidauros in 1980. So unavoidable were these associations that I wondered whether, as one ages, life becomes a succession of faded repetitions. But then I returned to the hotel and to Freya, who was now awake and ready for breakfast at a harborside cafe. We sat there for the best part of an hour, enjoying our English toast and espresso coffee, planning our day. But Freya was far ahead of me. She wanted her bedroom redecorated in preparation for her freshman year at high school. She had been thinking about it a lot. “I want a complete makeover,” she said. “Not only my room, but my hair. Everything.”
And so began the new day.