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“I said to the almond tree, ‘Sister, speak to me of God.’ And the almond tree blossomed.”
I would speak to Him boldly, tell him of man’s suffering and the suffering of bird, tree, and rock. We were all resolute in our desire not to die. In my hand I held a petition signed by all the trees, birds, beasts, and humans: “Father, we do not want you to eat us!” I would give Him this petition, I would not be afraid. I talked and implored in this way, girding my loins and trembling.
“Reach what you cannot!”
“Reach what you cannot!” It was your voice. No one else in the world could have uttered such a masculine command—only you, insatiable grandfather!
Virtue has gone mad, geometry and matter have gone mad. The law-giving mind must come again to establish a new order, new laws. The world must become a richer harmony.
“Return where you have failed, leave where you have succeeded”?
Fire and soil. How could I harmonize these two militant ancestors inside me?
Every living thing is a workshop where God, in hiding, processes and transubstantiates clay. This is why trees flower and fruit, why animals multiply, why the monkey managed to exceed its destiny and stand upright on its two feet. Now, for the first time since the world was made, man has been enabled to enter God’s workshop and labor with Him.
At first the faces seem like a brother’s or father’s; then, as I proceed to the roots, out of my loins bounds a hairy, heavy-jawed ancestor who hungers, thirsts, bellows, and whose eyes are filled with blood. This ancestor is the bulky, unwrought beast given me to transubstantiate into man—and to raise even higher than man if I can manage in the time allotted me.
If only the sweet voice within us could cover over the growl!
For this was my greatest ambition: to leave nothing for death to take—nothing but a few bones.
shepherding winds” as a Byzantine ascetic used to say; in other words, writing poetry.
This grandfather was the first to make me wish not to die—so that the dead within me should not die.
Truly, what miracles are the child’s mind, eyes, and ears! How insatiably they gobble down this world and fill themselves.
Truly, nothing more resembles God’s eyes than the eyes of a child; they see the world for the first time, and create it. Before this, the world is chaos. All creatures—animals, trees, men, stones; everything: forms, colors, voices, smells, lightning flashes—flow unexplained in front of the child’s eyes (no, not in front of them, inside them), and he cannot fasten them down, cannot establish order. The child’s world is made not of clay, to last, but of clouds. A cool breeze blows across his temples and the world condenses, attenuates, vanishes. Chaos must have passed in front of God’s eyes in
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All things were magically re-kneaded in my yeasty childhood mind; they were brought beyond the reasonable and very close to madness. But this madness is the grain of salt which keeps good sense from rotting.
Both of my parents circulate in my blood, the one fierce, hard, and morose, the other tender, kind, and saintly. I have carried them all my days; neither has died. As long as I live, they too will live inside me and battle in their antithetical ways to govern my thoughts and actions. My lifelong effort is to reconcile them so that the one may give me his strength, the other her tenderness; to make the discord between them, which breaks out incessantly within me, turn to harmony inside their son’s heart.
When the teacher told us that whoever follows God’s commandments goes to Abraham’s bosom, I swore inwardly to transgress all the commandments in order to save myself from that bosom.
Hero together with saint: that was the perfect man.
It is our duty to set ourselves an end beyond our individual concerns, beyond our convenient, agreeable habits, higher than our own selves, and disdaining laughter, hunger, even death, to toil night and day to attain that end. No, not to attain it. The self-respecting soul, as soon as he reaches his goal, places it still further away. Not to attain it, but never to halt in the ascent. Only thus does life acquire nobility and oneness.
I believe that it served as a great lesson in the crises of my life. I always remembered my father standing calmly, motionlessly on the threshold, neither cursing, entreating, nor weeping. Motionless, he stood watching the disaster and—alone among all the neighbors—preserved his human dignity.
I believe I would have seen my soul maturing during those hours if the invisible had become visible. I sensed that in the space of just a few hours I had begun to change abruptly from a child into a man.
The man who writes has an oppressive and unhappy fate. This is because the nature of his work obliges him to use words; that is, to convert his inner surge into immobility. Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover its meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons.
Liberty here had extinguished the yearning for liberty.
Above all, only now did I begin to have a presentiment of the great secret: that by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. Only two or three primitive passions had governed me until this time: fear, the struggle to conquer fear, and the yearning for freedom. But now two new passions were kindled inside me: beauty and the thirst for learning.
Never have I felt so deeply that our departed ancestors do not die, that at critical moments they cry out, jump to their feet, and take possession of our eyes, hands, and minds.
“He’ll butt his head against the stars and smash it in a thousand pieces,”
it turns on the faucet, permitting time to drain away uselessly and be lost, as though time were water. A beast that does not know it is a beast—such is youth.
From youth right to old age every word or deed which diverted me from my destiny I considered a sin. What was this destiny of mine, where was it leading me? Since my intellect still could not unravel the mystery, I allowed my heart to decide: “Do this, don’t do that. March! Do not halt or cry out. You have a single duty—to reach the limit.” “What limit?” I demanded. “Ask no questions. Advance!”
I believed I was wrong in my attempt to divine the future crone behind the young girl’s face; rather, I should re-create and resurrect in the face of the crone the freshness and youth of the girl who no longer existed.
All is finely balanced and measured. Even its virtues do not run to excess, do not break the human mean, but stop at a point beyond which, if they proceeded further, they would become either cruelly inhuman, or divine. The Attic landscape does not swagger, does not indulge in rhetoric, does not degenerate into fits of melodramatic swooning; it says what it has to say with a calm, virile forcefulness. By the simplest means possible it formulates the essential.
How did this miracle happen? Where did the grace find so much seriousness, the seriousness so much grace? How was the power able to avoid abusing its force? All this must constitute the Greek miracle.
The first time I stood in front of the Parthenon, my heart did not bound. The building seemed a feat of the intellect—of numbers, geometry—a faultless thought enmarbled, a sublime achievement of the mind, possessing every virtue—every
Every so often a breath of scorching wind filled my mouth and soul with sand. The stones were on fire. Not a flower, not a drop of water, not a single songbird to emit a sound to welcome the passer-by or jeer him away. Suspended above me was God, only God—like a sword. This God is not Christ, I thought to myself with a shudder. He is not the kind, sweetly speaking son of Mary. He is Jehovah, the terrifying man-eater. I sought the one and found the other.
He was Jehovah, the hard, vindictive, bloodthirsty God of only a single race, the Hebrew race. He had to be hard, vindictive, and bloodthirsty because He was passing through difficult times, was warring with the Amalekites, the Midianites, and the desert. He had to conquer them—by suffering, intriguing, killing—and save Himself. This arid, treeless, inhuman ravine we were traversing had been Jehovah’s fearsome sheath. Through here He had passed, bellowing.
I enjoyed this face of God for a good while, the jovial one that loves men and is fashioned out of soil, water, and human sweat. For the past three days I had confronted His other face, the terrible unflowering one made all of granite. I had told myself that this, the fire that burns, the granite too hard to be incised by human desires, was the true God. But now as I leaned over the fence into this flowering orchard, I recalled with emotion the ascetic’s saying: “God is a quiver and a gentle tear.”
He had given me what he himself termed the “elephant eye”—the ability to see all things as if for the first time and greet them, to see all things as if for the last time and bid them farewell.
Hubris is perhaps the only sin which the universal harmony considers mortal and does not forgive. The culmination of an organism’s power is fated to engender its destruction. There is also this incomprehensible fact: precisely because the living organism has accomplished its duty, that is why it is annihilated. If it had not carried out this duty, it would have lived—vegetated—for a much longer time, without bothering others, without being bothered itself.
The strong man does not swell up inordinately with cheek and insolence, for while on the one hand this law of harmony prods him to expand his might to the utmost, on the other it reminds him that each moment he advances in the service of the All, he advances toward his own personal annihilation.
We have a duty to follow and aid this eternal assault in our own epoch, to work in collaboration with it. Today it has seized upon the multitudes who slave and hunger; these multitudes today are its raw material. The masses cannot apprehend this merciless Assault. They give it tiny appellations to enable them to render it intelligible to their narrow minds and agreeable to their everyday needs. They name it happiness, equality, peace. But the invisible Struggler, leaving these lures to hearten the masses, battles harshly, mercilessly, to pierce through minds and bodies and create a message of
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Gradually I began to understand that it does not matter very much what problem, whether big or small, is tormenting us; the only thing that matters is that we be tormented, that we find a ground for being tormented. In other words, that we exercise our minds in order to keep certainty from turning us into idiots, that we fight to open every closed door we find in front of us.
Human tears can turn all the world’s water mills, but God’s mill they do not turn.”
The Chinese have a strange malediction: “I curse you; may you be born in an important age.”
Man’s soul seems to have grown bigger; it cannot fit any longer within the old molds. A pitiless civil war has broken out in the vitals of our age, has broken out, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the vitals of every man abreast of his times—a civil war between the old, formerly omnipotent myth which has vented its strength, yet which fights desperately to regulate our lives a while longer, and the new myth which is battling, still awkwardly and without organization, to govern our souls. That is why every living man is racked today by the dramatic fate of his times.
There are certain sensitive lips and fingertips which feel a tingling at a tempest’s approach, as though they were being pricked by thousands of needles. The creator’s lips and fingertips are of this kind. When the creator speaks with such certainty of the tempest which is bearing down upon us,
I kept divining the creator’s responsibility with ever-increasing clarity. Reality, I said to myself, does not exist independent of man, completed and ready; it comes about with man’s collaboration, and is proportionate to man’s worth. If we open a riverbed by writing or acting, reality may flow into that riverbed, into a course it would not have taken had we not intervened. We do not bear the full responsibility, naturally, but we do bear a great part.
“Unjust! Unjust!” I cried. “Such souls should not die. Will earth, water, fire, and chance ever be able to fashion a Zorba again?”
Man hurries, God does not. That is why man’s works are uncertain and maimed, while God’s are flawless and sure. My eyes welling with tears, I vowed never to transgress this eternal law again. Like a tree I would be blasted by wind, struck by sun and rain, and would wait with confidence; the long-desired hour of flowering and fruit would come.
Who were the two artists of ancient times who competed to see who could paint the visible world most faithfully? “Now I shall prove to you that I am the best,” said the first, showing the other a curtain which he had painted. “Well, draw back the curtain,” said the adversary, “and let us see the picture.” “The curtain is the picture,” replied the first with a laugh. During this entire voyage of mine on the Aegean I had sensed with profundity that the curtain is truly the picture. Alas for him who rips the curtain in order to see the picture. He will see nothing but chaos.
as I was fighting to see how far the red line marking my ascension had reached up to now, I was suddenly overcome by sacred awe. This red line had not been inscribed by my blood; someone else was ascending, someone else’s blood was flowing from his wounds and tracing a red course over land and sea—someone incomparably higher than me, a gigantic ancestor, a sea-fighter and mountaineer. I was no more than his shadow, the faithful shadow following him. I did not perceive him; I simply heard his sigh or thunderous laughter from time to time. I would look around me then and see no one. But I felt
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