The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller

I suppose I’ll never again experience the warmth of affection which surrounded me that morning as we embarked on our journey. We had been having, a bite on deck - one of those impromptu meals which Katsimbalis loves to put away at any hour of the day or night, when he is in good fettle. Towards noon we came within sight of the island of Poros. It was late fall, which means that the weather was beautifully mild. Seferis and Katsimbalis were jubilant: they had not had a holiday in ages. It was Ghika’s painting which roused me from my bedazzled stupor.Ī week or so later we all boarded the boat at Peiraeus to go to Hydra where Ghika had his ancestral home. Ghika is a seeker after light and truth: his paintings go beyond the Greek world. Ghika’s canvases are as fresh and clean, as pure and naked of all pretense, as the sea and light which bathes the dazzling islands. Ghika has placed himself in the center of all time, in that self-perpetuating Greece which has no borders, no limits, no age. I got a bifocal slant on this world which was now making me giddy with names, dates, legends. I saw a new Greece, the quintessential Greece which the artist had abstracted from the muck and confusion of time, of place, of history. Then one day Seferis and Katsimbalis introduced me to the painter Ghika. I was so bewildered by all the opportunities lying before me that I was paralyzed. All the Englishmen I met were always coming back from somewhere, some island, some monastery, some ancient ruin, some place of mystery. Athos, to Pelion and Ossa, to Leonidion and Monemvasia Durrell would set my mind whirling with Pythagorean adventures a little Welshman, just back from Persia, would drag me over the high plateaus and deposit me in Samarkand where I would meet the headless horseman called Death.

In another way I was doing a great deal of traveling people came to me at the cafés and poured out their journeys to me the captain was always returning from a new trajectory Seferis was always writing a new poem which went back deep into the past and forward as far as the seventh root race Katsimbalis would take me on his monologues to Mt. I say fortunately because on that day, if we had gone another few miles, I would have lost my head completely. Fortunately the road was blocked and we had to turn back.

One day I had been as far as Mandra, which is past Eleusis on the way to Megara. People are asking me-have you been to Delphi, have you been to Santorini, have you been to Lesbos or Samos or Poros? I have been practically nowhere, except back and forth to Corfu.

The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller