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400 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
"Nothing ever happens to me."
I wrote the words slowly, looked at them for a moment with a little sigh, then put my ballpoint pen down on the cafe table and rummaged in my handbag for a cigarette.
As I breathed the smoke in I looked about me. It occurred to me, thinking of that last depressed sentence in my letter to Elizabeth, that enough was happening at the moment to satisfy all by the most adventure-hungry. That is the impression Athens gives you. Everyone is moving, talking, gesticulating--but particularly talking. The second one remembers in Athens is not the clamour of pneumatic drill or even the age-old sound of chisels chipping away at the Pentelic marble which is still the cheapest stone for building . . . what one remembers about Athens is the roar of talking. Up to your high hotel window, above the smell of dust and the blare of traffic it comes, surging like the sea below the temple at Sunium--the sound of Athenian voices arguing, laughing, talk-talk-talking, as once they talked the world into shape in the busy colonnades of the Agora, not so very far from where I sat.
"But I do admit there's another side to this Great Emancipation. Things do seem a trifle dull occasionally, after so many years spent being swept along in Philip's - you must admit - magnificent wake! I feel just a little bit high and dry. You'd have thought something - some sniff of an adventure - would have happened to a young woman (is one still young at twenty-five?) marooned on her own in the wilds of Hellas, but no! I go tamely from temple to temple, guidebook in hand, and spend the rather long evenings writing up notes for that wonderful book I was always going to write, and persuading myself I'm enjoying the peace and quiet... "After that opening, I welcomed Camilla's obviously forthcoming adventures. She's earned her excitement.
“I think the secret is that it belongs to all of us - to us of the West. We've learned to think in its terms, and to live in its laws. It's given us almost everything that our world has that is worthwhile. Truth, straight thinking, freedom, beauty. It's our second language, our second line of thought, our second country. We all have our own country -- and Greece.”