Delectations

Piraeus. Is the port just down from Athens, a five-dollar taxi-ride, and it is from Piraeus that one generally sets out to see the Greek islands, and to write about them, which is the resolve of practically everybody who sets out from Piraeus by boat. The writer-traveler is, alas, usually poetry-struck. Even real poets overdo it (or is it, in the case of Kazantzakis, the translator? Or, better, the untranslatability?). “The sea simmered and reeked of rotten watermelon, tomatoes bobbed on the swell, mustachioed men cracked sunflower seeds and spat far in the direction of the water.” You can do that sort of thing all along the Greek Islands if you choose, but it takes a very, very sensitive nose, one which for instance will pick up the reek of rotten watermelon, which has no reek: but you can usually get away with it, see Holiday. If you are more ambitious, you will infuse primeval meaning into your observations, as Kazantzakis of course did (in a way, he was like Mailer, who decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books), e.g. you cannot travel in the Pelopponese, or better, Kazantzakis cannot travel in the Pelopponese, without concluding such things as that “spiritual and ethical decency, the priceless bashfulness of youth, the sacred ‘down’ of spiritual purity, finds shelter only in the provinces. In a great city the child is born without this down, his eyes and ears are soon corrupted, and this precocious maturity deforms his soul.” This of course may be true; and it doesn’t seem to matter at all that on the other hand it may just not be true. Or you can stage-set your way to mythological cadenzas on any pretext. The weather turns. So? “The old Olympian god was toying with his worshippers, in daylight he was Zeus Agoraios, supervising commerce so that blankets and brassware and horses and pigs would sell well; but last night he had secretly rounded up the clouds, to see mortals sopped and shrieking, and to pass his time. Zeus became Jupiter Pluvius and came down to earth. . . .” etc.

But the Islands of the Aegean, unpretentious, and unpretentiously viewed, are altogether absorbing. That they were the mise en scene for great happenings in Western history does not itself endow them with beauty or tranquillity or, even, mystery; any more than the haunted corridor leading off the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles is beautiful or tranquil or mysterious. But some of the islands are beautiful by almost any measure, some of them are arrestingly tranquil, and a few are all three; and it is greatly worth the visitor’s time and attention to see and determine for himself, see the island almost deserted; one where perhaps the greatest spiritual-maritime community arose; another kept clean and busy and functional by fishermen who seem to have a highly functional notion of the need for consistency in order to achieve architectural repose; the swinging port with grandma mosaic shops and churches and boats and tavernas; the grotto where John (the local literature call him “the Theologue”) wrote his sublime Gospel before returning to Ephesus (it was there that we puzzled over the Turkish ticket-seller’s comment, “Kinnedy —Kaput!”—the awful meaning of which we knew two hours later on reaching the boat). Our route—and ratings (merely suggestive, and weighted so as to include, more or less equally, historical glamor, and pleasantness of the natural and architectural surroundings): Kea (**), Delos (****), Mikonos (***), Fourni (*) Samos (****), Ephesus (*****), Patmos (****), Amorgos (***), Ios (****), Naxos (*), Paros (***), Santorini (***), Sifnos (*), Serifos (**), Hydra (****), Poros (***).