Athens. I’ll read you what he says about the rocks—just the rocks, nothing more. You can’t know what a rock is until you’ve heard what Yannopoulos has written. He talks about rocks for pages and pages; he invents rocks, by God, when he can’t find any to rave about. People say he was crazy, Yannopoulos. He wasn’t crazy—he was mad. There’s a difference. His voice was too strong for his body: it consumed him. He was like Icarus—the sun melted his wings. He soared too high. He was an eagle. These rabbits we call critics can’t understand a man like Yannopoulos. He was out of proportion. He raved about the wrong things, according to them. He didn’t have le sens de mesure , as the French say. There you are— mesure . What a mean little word! They look at the Parthenon and they find the proportions so harmonious. All rot. The human proportions which the Greek extolled were superhuman. They weren’t French proportions. They were divine, because the true Greek is a god, not a cautious, precise, calculating being with the soul of an engineer….”
Our stay at Spetsai was prolonged because the boat for Nauplia failed to appear. I began to fear that we would be marooned there indefinitely. However, one fine day along about four in the afternoon the boat finally did show up. It was an unserviceable English ferry which rolled with the slightest ripple. We sat on deck watching the sinking sun. It was one of those Biblical sunsets in which man is completely absent. Nature simply opens her bloody, insatiable maw and swallows everything in sight. Law, order, morality, justice, wisdom, any abstraction seems like a cruel joke perpetrated on a helpless world of idiots. Sunset at sea is for me a dread spectacle: it is hideous, murderous, soulless. The earth may be cruel but the sea is heartless. There is absolutely no place of refuge; there are only the elements and the elements are treacherous.
We were to touch at Leonidion before putting in at Nauplia. I was hoping it would still be light enough to catch a glimpse of the place because it was this grim corner of the Peloponnesus that the Katsimbalis side of the family stemmed from. Unfortunately the sun was rapidly setting just behind the wall of rock under which Leonidion lies. By the time the boat dropped anchor it was night. All I could distinguish in the gloom was a little cove illuminated by four or five feeble electric bulbs. A dank, chill breath descended from the precipitous black wall above us, adding to the desolate and forbidding atmosphere of the place. Straining my eyes to pierce the chill, mist-laden gloom it seemed to me that I perceived a gap in the hills which my imagination peopled with rude, barbaric tribesmen moving stealthily about in search of forage. I would not have been the least surprised to hear the beat of a tom-tom or a blood-curdling war whoop. The setting was unrelievedly sinister—another death trap. I could well imagine how it must have been centuries ago, when the morning sun pierced the fever-laden mist, disclosing the naked bodies of the slain, their stalwart, handsome figures mutilated by the javelin, the axe, the wheel. Horrible though the image was I could not help but think how much cleaner that than the sight of a shell-torn trench with bits of human flesh strewn about like chicken feed. I can’t for the life of me recall by what weird modulation we arrived at the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, but as the boat pulled out and we installed ourselves at a table in the saloon before a couple of innocent glasses of ouzo Katsimbalis was leading me by the hand from café to café along that thoroughfare which is engraved in my memory as perhaps no other street in Paris. At least five or six times it has happened to me now that on taking leave of a strange city or saying good-bye to an old friend this street, which is certainly not the most extraordinary street in the world, has been the parting theme. There is without doubt
Our stay at Spetsai was prolonged because the boat for Nauplia failed to appear. I began to fear that we would be marooned there indefinitely. However, one fine day along about four in the afternoon the boat finally did show up. It was an unserviceable English ferry which rolled with the slightest ripple. We sat on deck watching the sinking sun. It was one of those Biblical sunsets in which man is completely absent. Nature simply opens her bloody, insatiable maw and swallows everything in sight. Law, order, morality, justice, wisdom, any abstraction seems like a cruel joke perpetrated on a helpless world of idiots. Sunset at sea is for me a dread spectacle: it is hideous, murderous, soulless. The earth may be cruel but the sea is heartless. There is absolutely no place of refuge; there are only the elements and the elements are treacherous.
We were to touch at Leonidion before putting in at Nauplia. I was hoping it would still be light enough to catch a glimpse of the place because it was this grim corner of the Peloponnesus that the Katsimbalis side of the family stemmed from. Unfortunately the sun was rapidly setting just behind the wall of rock under which Leonidion lies. By the time the boat dropped anchor it was night. All I could distinguish in the gloom was a little cove illuminated by four or five feeble electric bulbs. A dank, chill breath descended from the precipitous black wall above us, adding to the desolate and forbidding atmosphere of the place. Straining my eyes to pierce the chill, mist-laden gloom it seemed to me that I perceived a gap in the hills which my imagination peopled with rude, barbaric tribesmen moving stealthily about in search of forage. I would not have been the least surprised to hear the beat of a tom-tom or a blood-curdling war whoop. The setting was unrelievedly sinister—another death trap. I could well imagine how it must have been centuries ago, when the morning sun pierced the fever-laden mist, disclosing the naked bodies of the slain, their stalwart, handsome figures mutilated by the javelin, the axe, the wheel. Horrible though the image was I could not help but think how much cleaner that than the sight of a shell-torn trench with bits of human flesh strewn about like chicken feed. I can’t for the life of me recall by what weird modulation we arrived at the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, but as the boat pulled out and we installed ourselves at a table in the saloon before a couple of innocent glasses of ouzo Katsimbalis was leading me by the hand from café to café along that thoroughfare which is engraved in my memory as perhaps no other street in Paris. At least five or six times it has happened to me now that on taking leave of a strange city or saying good-bye to an old friend this street, which is certainly not the most extraordinary street in the world, has been the parting theme. There is without doubt
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