to your waist while you dined. The water was so still and clear that the candles hardly moved on such summer nights. And the bronze moon was huge.
Our heating system was mostly charcoal, which meant twenty minutes to boil a kettle for a cup of tea with much puffing and blowing. Primus stoves were very expensive and had a tendency to explode. As for light we used paraffin with its peculiar smell and though the Aladdin lamp had been invented it was expensive and was hard to obtain mantles.
The roads were washed out in winter and the little local bus service was caïques in summer; but when the sea was high they couldnât go. Most of you now have been to Greece or have seen enough of Greece in pictures to know those little island boats which ferry the melons and the fruit and vegetables back and forward. Well, theyâre also passenger buses, and in summer we had a daily waterbus to town which took two hours flat and the same back in the evening which took two and a half hours flat according to what the wind and weather was like. This fragile line of communication was completely washed out in the winter and we were left alone on this extraordinary hillside. I started at once to try and learn Greek, which is a very difficult language. Iâd only done two years of classical Greek and it really wasnât enough. I hadnât been interested until I got there. But there were things which struck me very forcibly and touched me very much. Mainly that when I was starting on doing Demotic Greek with the local schoolmaster, I found that in almost any Greek sentence about 3 out of 5 wordsâno thatâs an exaggerationâletâs say 3 out of 7 words came out of Aristotle or Homer. And it was a perfectly astonishing realization to me that Greece hadnât agedâthe language that Greece usedâhadnât aged as much as our own English because we started with the old Attic grammar and while a lot of the tenses had changed, and naturally a lot of vocabulary had changed and so on, the actual structure of the language as such is quite visibly there, still. And I donât think you could begin to teach English out of Chaucer, which would be roughly the comparison to today. And then Homer became more actual to me in this context, and I started brushing up the little ancient Greek I knew, and a whole winter, my first whole winter passed in that way, studying, teeth chattering with cold. There was no chimney in the house and finally my landlord put logs in an ordinary room there and burnt them so that the room filled with smoke and the smoke went out steadily through the ceiling. It was more Homeric than Homer. We roasted lambs on the spit and mopped up the blood. And drank retzina, the resined wine of Greece.
But there were also other fascinating things. When I started to learn Greek it was the popular tongue I studied, the so-called Demotic. But I rapidly realized that there were two distinct Greek languagesâone for the newspapers and one for the hearth. The popular one had evolved itself comfortably by peasant use, and a much simplified syntactical approach. But this was considered too vulgar to write down, and a highly purified sort of Greek had been evolved for the newspapers, thus causing a great and unnecessary problem for schools and parents. Can you imagine talking the way you do in ordinary life and yet being forced to read Elizabethan prose every time you opened the Los Angeles Times, with a classier and more classical vocabulary? This has been a real plague for the Greek poets and only now has the battle been won for Demotic Greek thanks to half a century of taming and civilizing this language for the uses of poetry. But at the turn of the century when someone suggested turning the Bible into Modern Demotic Greek there were street battles and deaths. Only a highly educated classics scholar could read the Bible then, and the priests didnât want to let the peasants know the meaning of what
Our heating system was mostly charcoal, which meant twenty minutes to boil a kettle for a cup of tea with much puffing and blowing. Primus stoves were very expensive and had a tendency to explode. As for light we used paraffin with its peculiar smell and though the Aladdin lamp had been invented it was expensive and was hard to obtain mantles.
The roads were washed out in winter and the little local bus service was caïques in summer; but when the sea was high they couldnât go. Most of you now have been to Greece or have seen enough of Greece in pictures to know those little island boats which ferry the melons and the fruit and vegetables back and forward. Well, theyâre also passenger buses, and in summer we had a daily waterbus to town which took two hours flat and the same back in the evening which took two and a half hours flat according to what the wind and weather was like. This fragile line of communication was completely washed out in the winter and we were left alone on this extraordinary hillside. I started at once to try and learn Greek, which is a very difficult language. Iâd only done two years of classical Greek and it really wasnât enough. I hadnât been interested until I got there. But there were things which struck me very forcibly and touched me very much. Mainly that when I was starting on doing Demotic Greek with the local schoolmaster, I found that in almost any Greek sentence about 3 out of 5 wordsâno thatâs an exaggerationâletâs say 3 out of 7 words came out of Aristotle or Homer. And it was a perfectly astonishing realization to me that Greece hadnât agedâthe language that Greece usedâhadnât aged as much as our own English because we started with the old Attic grammar and while a lot of the tenses had changed, and naturally a lot of vocabulary had changed and so on, the actual structure of the language as such is quite visibly there, still. And I donât think you could begin to teach English out of Chaucer, which would be roughly the comparison to today. And then Homer became more actual to me in this context, and I started brushing up the little ancient Greek I knew, and a whole winter, my first whole winter passed in that way, studying, teeth chattering with cold. There was no chimney in the house and finally my landlord put logs in an ordinary room there and burnt them so that the room filled with smoke and the smoke went out steadily through the ceiling. It was more Homeric than Homer. We roasted lambs on the spit and mopped up the blood. And drank retzina, the resined wine of Greece.
But there were also other fascinating things. When I started to learn Greek it was the popular tongue I studied, the so-called Demotic. But I rapidly realized that there were two distinct Greek languagesâone for the newspapers and one for the hearth. The popular one had evolved itself comfortably by peasant use, and a much simplified syntactical approach. But this was considered too vulgar to write down, and a highly purified sort of Greek had been evolved for the newspapers, thus causing a great and unnecessary problem for schools and parents. Can you imagine talking the way you do in ordinary life and yet being forced to read Elizabethan prose every time you opened the Los Angeles Times, with a classier and more classical vocabulary? This has been a real plague for the Greek poets and only now has the battle been won for Demotic Greek thanks to half a century of taming and civilizing this language for the uses of poetry. But at the turn of the century when someone suggested turning the Bible into Modern Demotic Greek there were street battles and deaths. Only a highly educated classics scholar could read the Bible then, and the priests didnât want to let the peasants know the meaning of what
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