‘Sacred Awe’ – the joy of discovering Zorba the Greek in middle age
Kazantzakis was not only a complicated name, but a portent of something exotic and unfathomable. I left him alone. Now, in middle age, Zorba the Greek came back to my attention at the right time. By
Arriving at the front door of an old book is often the result of incidental events. A holiday that exposes you to an unfamiliar culture or geography may awaken interest in its great writers.
That’s what led me to Alexis Zorba, the larger-than-life character who occupies centre stage in a novel that should stand alongside other “classics” in bookstores. I had to order it to bring it back to South Africa.
Getting through a classic is often the start of another journey. But, as I realised halfway through reading Zorba the Greek, the challenge is not to “get through it”, but to delve into it. To linger. Long.
Reading Zorba the Greek, first published in 1946 by Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis, was an unexpected journey. I had heard of it, but my youthful interest in post-World War 2 European literature was mainly existentialists: Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett. These men combined a revolutionary rejection of capitalist society with my own sense of alienation from it.
By contrast, Kazantzakis seemed a complicated name and a portent of something exotic and unfathomable. I left him alone.
I’m glad I didn’t read the novel then. It shouldn’t be studied as a student. Best appreciation of its mastery needs half a lifetime behind you, and willingness to read slowly. “How simple and frugal a thing is happiness.”
It’s a simple story. A young intellectual is stranded, by choice, on an island – Crete – that is not only beautiful but ideal for its position between civilisations and 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 was the centre of the universe. As the narrator says: “On this Cretan soil, every stone, every tree has its tragic history.”
As Zorba and the narrator discover the island, there’s a playful allusion to The Tempest. But Crete is not uninhabited. In fact it provides the story with a village and 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 for
Buddhism it’s a vindication of the “Don’t just do something, stand still” principle.
After an almost Joycean trawl through Zorba’s encounters with women, death, war and the narrator’s enjoyment of them, the book ends after a tragi-comic failure by the heroes to complete a mission to mine lignite on Crete. After a dance made famous by Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates in the 1964 film of the novel, they depart the island, go their separate ways, and news one day reaches the narrator of Zorba’s death in a Serbian village and a message: “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.”
It is an exploration of life, our place on the planet, beauty and friendship.
There are 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 similar conclusions about the futility of homo sapiens’ struggles to invest ourselves with meaning. While the narrator is “contaminated by blasted books”, Zorba’s philosophy is don’t think, don’t question, don’t write or read, just be and do.
Zorba’s mere presence is a 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.”
Questions thrown up have a timeless but uncanny immediacy.
Zorba, the philosopher, 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!”
Other questions are more existential. Reading Zorba in a time of gathering darkness was a chance to get out into the light. Our world is beset by wars; we have failed to find the equilibrium and equality around which poets have long constructed poems, plays and novels.
Interspersed with vignettes, village idiots, unrequited widows, a murder and Dame Quicklys, the novel is full of philosophy, 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...
“I stopped. I wanted to say, ‘From that moment begins poetry’, but Zorba would not have understood. I stopped.”
From that moment begins poetry.