The Colossus of Maroussi

by Miller, Henry

  To the left of us ran the range leading to Parnassus, grim, silent, hoary with legend. Strange that all the time I was in Paris, all that joy and misery associated with Montparnasse, I never once thought of the place from which the name derives. On the other hand, though no one had ever counselled me to go there, Thebes had been in my mind ever since the day I landed in Athens. By some unaccountable quirk the name Thebes, just as Memphis in Egypt, always brought to life a welter of fantastic memories and when, in the chill morgue of the museum there, I espied that most exquisite stone drawing so like one of Picasso’s illustrations, when I saw the rigid Egyptian-like colossi, I felt as if I were back in some familiar past, back in a world which I had known as a child. Thebes, even after one has visited it, remains in the memory very much like the vague, tremulous reveries which attend a long wait in the antechamber of a dentist’s office. Waiting to have a tooth extracted one often gets involved in the plan of a new book; one fairly seethes with ideas. Then comes the torture, the book is expunged from the consciousness; days pass in which nothing more brilliant is accomplished than sticking the tongue in a little cavity of the gum which seems enormous. Finally that too is forgotten and one is at work again and perhaps the new book is begun, but not as it was feverishly planned back in the cauterized waiting-room. And then, of a night when one tosses fitfully, plagued by swarms of irrelevant thoughts, suddenly the constellation of the lost tooth swims over the horizon and one is in Thebes, the old childhood Thebes from which all the novels have issued, and one sees the plan of the great life’s work finely etched on a tablet of stone—and this is the book one always meant to write but it is forgotten in the morning, and thus Thebes is forgotten and God and the whole meaning of life and one’s own identity and the identities of the past and so one worships Picasso who stayed awake all night and kept his bad tooth. This you know when you pass through Thebes, and it is disquieting, but it is also inspiring and when you are thoroughly inspired you hang yourself by the ankles and wait for the vultures to devour you alive. Then the real Montparnasse life begins, with Diana the huntress in the background and the Sphinx waiting for you at a bend in the road.

  We stopped for lunch at Levadia, a sort of Alpine village nestling against a wall of the mountain range. The air was crisp and exhilarating, balmy in the sun and chill as a knife in the shade. The doors of the restaurant were opened wide to suck in the sunlit air. It was a colossal refectory lined with tin like the inside of a biscuit box; the cutlery, the plates, the tabletops were ice cold; we ate with our hats and overcoats on.

  From Levadia to Arachova was like a breathless ride on the scenic railway through a tropical Iceland. Seldom a human being, seldom a vehicle; a world growing more and more rarefied, more and more miraculous. Under lowering clouds the scene became immediately ominous and terrifying: only a god could survive the furious onslaught of the elements in this stark Olympian world.

  At Arachova Ghika got out to vomit. I stood at the edge of a deep canyon and as I looked down into its depths I saw the shadow of a great eagle wheeling over the void. We were on the very ridge of the mountains, in the midst of a convulsed land which was seemingly still writhing and twisting. The village itself had the bleak, frostbitten look of a community cut off from the outside world by an avalanche. There was the continuous roar of an icy waterfall which, though hidden from the eye, seemed omnipresent. The proximity of the eagles, their shadows mysteriously darkening the ground, added to the chill, bleak sense of desolation. And yet from Arachova to the outer precincts of Delphi the earth presents one continuously sublime, dramatic spectacle. Imagine a bubbling cauldron into which a fearless band of men descend to spread a magic carpet. Imagine this carpet to be composed of the most ingenious patterns and the most variegated hues. Imagine that men have been at this task for several thousand years and that to relax for but a season is to destroy the work of centuries. Imagine that with every groan, sneeze or hiccough which the earth vents the carpet is grievously ripped and tattered. Imagine that the tints and hues which compose this dancing carpet of earth rival in splendor and subtlety the most beautiful stained glass windows of the mediaeval cathedrals. Imagine all this and you have only a glimmering comprehension of a spectacle which is changing hourly, monthly, yearly, millennially. Finally, in a state of dazed, drunken, battered stupefaction you come upon Delphi. It is four in the afternoon, say, and a mist blowing in from the sea has turned the world completely upside down. You are in Mongolia and the faint tinkle of bells from across the gully tells you that a caravan is approaching. The sea has become a mountain lake poised high above the mountaintops where the sun is sputtering out like a rum-soaked omelette. On the fierce glacial wall where the mist lifts for a moment someone has written with lightning speed in an unknown script. To the other side, as if borne along like a cataract, a sea of grass slips over the precipitous slope of a cliff. It has the brilliance of the vernal equinox, a green which grows between the stars in the twinkling of an eye.

  Seeing it in this strange twilight mist Delphi seemed even more sublime and awe-inspiring than I had imagined it to be. I actually felt relieved, upon rolling up to the little bluff above the pavilion where we left the car, to find a group of idle village boys shooting dice: it gave a human touch to the scene. From the towering windows of the pavilion, which was built along the solid, generous lines of a mediaeval fortress, I could look across the gulch and, as the mist lifted, a pocket of the sea became visible—just beyond the hidden port of Itea. As soon as we had installed our things we looked for Katsimbalis whom we found at the Apollo Hotel—I believe he was the only guest since the departure of H. G. Wells under whose name I signed my own in the register though I was not stopping at the hotel. He, Wells, had a very fine, small hand, almost womanly, like that of a very modest, unobtrusive person, but then that is so characteristic of English handwriting that there is nothing unusual about it.

  By dinnertime it was raining and we decided to eat in a little restaurant by the roadside. The place was as chill as the grave. We had a scanty meal supplemented by liberal portions of wine and cognac. I enjoyed that meal immensely, perhaps because I was in the mood to talk. As so oft en happens, when one has come at last to an impressive spot, the conversation had absolutely nothing to do with the scene. I remember vaguely the expression of astonishment on Ghika’s and Katsimbalis’ faces as I unlimbered at length upon the American scene. I believe it was a description of Kansas that I was giving them; at any rate it was a picture of emptiness and monotony such as to stagger them. When we got back to the bluff behind the pavilion, whence we had to pick our way in the dark, a gale was blowing and the rain was coming down in bucketfuls. It was only a short stretch we had to traverse but it was perilous. Being somewhat lit up I had supreme confidence in my ability to find my way unaided. Now and then a flash of lightning lit up the path which was swimming in mud. In these lurid moments the scene was so harrowingly desolate that I felt as if we were enacting a scene from Macbeth. “Blow wind and crack!” I shouted, gay as a mud-lark, and at that moment I slipped to my knees and would have rolled down a gully had not Katsimbalis caught me by the arm. When I saw the spot next morning I almost fainted.

  We slept with the windows closed and a great fire roaring in the huge stove. At breakfast we congregated about a long communion table in a hall that would have done credit to a Dominican monastery. The food was excellent and abundant, the view from the window superb. The place was so enormous, the floor so inviting, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to do some fancy skating in my shoes. I sailed in and out the corridors, the refectory, the salon, the studios, delivering glad tidings from the ruler of my ninth house, Mercury himself.

  It was now time to inspect the ruins, extract the last oracular juices from the extinct navel. We climbed up the hill to the theatre whence we overlooked the splintered treasuries of the gods, the ruined temples, the fallen columns, trying vainly to recreate the splendor of this ancient site. We speculated at length on the exact position of the c
ity itself which is as yet undiscovered. Suddenly, as we stood there silently and reverently, Katsimbalis strode to the center of the bowl and holding his arms aloft delivered the closing lines of the last oracle. It was an impressive moment, to say the least. For a second, so it seemed, the curtain had been lifted on a world which had never really perished but which had rolled away like a cloud and was preserving itself intact, inviolate, until the day when, restored to his senses, man would summon it back to life again. In the few seconds it took him to pronounce the words I had a long glimpse down the broad avenue of man’s folly and, seeing no end to the vista, experienced a poignant feeling of distress and of sadness which was in no way connected with my own fate but with that of the species to which by accident I happen to belong. I recalled other oracular utterances I had heard in Paris, in which the present war, horrible as it is, was represented as but an item in the long catalogue of impending disasters and reversals, and I remembered the skeptical way in which these utterances were received. The world which passed away with Delphi passed away as in a sleep. It is the same now. Victory and defeat are meaningless in the light of the wheel which relentlessly revolves. We are moving into a new latitude of the soul, and a thousand years hence men will wonder at our blindness, our torpor, our supine acquiescence to an order which was doomed.

  We had a drink at the Castellian Spring where I suddenly remembered my old friend Nick of the Orpheum Dance Palace on Broadway because he had come from a little village called Castellia in the valley beyond the mountains. In a way my friend Nick was largely responsible for my being here, I reflected, for it was through his terpsichorean instrumentations that I met my wife June and if I hadn’t met her I should probably never have become a writer, never have left America, never have met Betty Ryan, Lawrence Durrell and finally Stephanides, Katsimbalis and Ghika.

  After wandering about amidst the broken columns we ascended the tortuous path to the stadium on high. Katsimbalis took off his overcoat and with giant strides measured it from end to end. The setting is spectacular. Set just below the crest of the mountain one has the impression that when the course was finished the charioteers must have driven their steeds over the ridge and into the blue. The atmosphere is superhuman, intoxicating to the point of madness. Everything that is extraordinary and miraculous about Delphi gathers here in the memory of the games which were held in the clouds. As I turned to go I saw a shepherd leading his flock over the ridge; his figure was so sharply delineated against the sky that he seemed to be bathed in a violet aura; the sheep moved slowly over the smooth spine in a golden fuzz, as though somnolently emerging from the dead pages of a forgotten idyll.

  In the museum I came again upon the colossal Theban statues which have never ceased to haunt me and finally we stood before the amazing statue of Antinous, last of the gods. I could not help but contrast in my mind this most wonderful idealization in stone of the eternal duality of man, so bold and simple, so thoroughly Greek in the best sense, with that literary creation of Balzac’s, Seraphita, which is altogether vague and mysterious and, humanly speaking, altogether unconvincing. Nothing could better convey the transition from light to darkness, from the pagan to the Christian conception of life, than this enigmatic figure of the last god on earth who flung himself into the Nile. By emphasizing the soulful qualities of man Christianity succeeded only in disembodying man; as angel the sexes fuse into the sublime spiritual being which man essentially is. The Greeks, on the other hand, gave body to everything, thereby incarnating the spirit and eternalizing it. In Greece one is ever filled with the sense of eternality which is expressed in the here and now; the moment one returns to the Western world, whether in Europe or America, this feeling of body, of eternality, of incarnated spirit is shattered. We move in clock time amidst the debris of vanished worlds, inventing the instruments of our own destruction, oblivious of fate or destiny, knowing never a moment of peace, possessing not an ounce of faith, a prey to the blackest superstitions, functioning neither in the body nor in the spirit, active not as individuals but as microbes in the organism of the diseased.

  That night, at the dinner table in the big hall, while listening to Pericles Byzantis, I made up my mind to return to Athens the next day. He had just been urging me to stay, and indeed there was every reason for me to stay, but I had the feeling that something awaited me in Athens and I knew I would not stay. Next morning at breakfast, to his great amazement, I told him of my decision. I told him very frankly that I could give no good reason for my departure—except that best of all reasons, imperious desire. I had had the distinction of being the very first foreigner to enjoy the privileges of the new pavilion and my abrupt leave-taking was undoubtedly a poor way of expressing my gratitude, but so it was. Ghika and Katsimbalis quickly decided to return with me. I hope that when he reads what happened to me upon my return to Athens the good Kyrios Byzantis will forgive my rude behavior and not consider it as typically American.

  The return at top speed was even more impressive to me than our coming. We passed through Thebes in the late afternoon, Katsimbalis regaling me with a story of his mad motorcycle trips from Thebes to Athens after he had had a skinful. It seemed to me that we had just skirted the vicinity of the great battlefield of Platea and were perhaps facing Mount Kithaeron when suddenly I became aware of a curious trap-like formation through which we were whirling like a drunken cork. Again we had come to one of those formidable passes where the invading enemy had been slaughtered like pigs, a spot which must be the solace and the joy of defending generals everywhere. Here it was, it would not surprise me to discover, that Oedipus had met the Sphinx. I was profoundly disturbed, shaken to the roots. And by what? By associations born of my knowledge of ancient events? Scarcely, since I have but the scantiest knowledge of Greek history and even that is thoroughly confused, as is all history to me. No, as with the sacred places so with the murderous spots—the record of events is written into the earth. The real joy of the historian or the archaeologist when confronted with a discovery must lie in the fact of confirmation, corroboration, not in surprise. Nothing that has happened on this earth, however deeply buried, is hidden from man. Certain spots stand out like semaphores, revealing not only the clue but the event—provided, to be sure, they are approached with utter purity of heart. I am convinced that there are many layers of history and that the final reading will be delayed until the gift of seeing past and future as one is restored to us.

  I thought, when I got back to my hotel and found that money had been cabled me for my return to America, that that was what had drawn me back to Athens, but in the morning when I found Katsimbalis waiting for me with a mysterious smile upon his face I discovered that there was another, more important reason. It was a cold wintry day with a stiff wind blowing down from the encircling hills. It was a Sunday. Somehow everything had undergone a radical change. A boat was leaving in about ten days and the knowledge that I would take that boat had already brought the journey to an end.

  Katsimbalis had come to propose a visit to an Armenian soothsayer whom he and several of his friends had already consulted. I consented with alacrity, never having been to a soothsayer in my life. Once in Paris I had been on the verge of doing so, having witnessed the hallucinating effect of such an experience upon two of my close friends. I was of the opinion that nothing more could be expected than a good or bad reading of one’s own mind.

  The abode of this particular soothsayer was in the Armenian refugee quarter of Athens, a section of the city I had not yet seen. I had heard that it was sordid and picturesque but nothing I had heard about it had quite prepared me for the sight which greeted my eyes. By no means the least curious feature of this neighborhood is its duality. Around the rotten yolk of the egg lies the immaculate new shell of the community which is to be. For almost twenty years these miserable refugees have been waiting to move into the new quarters which have been promised them. These new homes which the government has provided and which now stand ready for occupancy (rent free, I bel
ieve), are models in every sense of the word. The contrast between these and the hovels in which the refugees have somehow managed to survive for a generation is fantastic, to say the least. From the rubbish heap a whole community provided shelter for itself and for its animals, its pets, its rodents, its lice, its bedbugs, its microbes. With the march of civilization such pustulant, festering agglomerations of humanity are of course no unusual sight. The more staggering the world cities become in elegance and proportion, in power and influence, the more cataclysmic the upheavals, the vaster the armies of footloose, destitute, homeless, penniless individuals who, unlike the miserable Armenians of Athens, are not even privileged to dig in the dung-heaps for the scraps with which to provide themselves with shelter but are forced to keep on the march like phantoms, confronted in their own land with rifles, hand grenades, barbed wire, shunned like lepers, driven out like the pest.

  The home of Aram Hourabedian was buried in the heart of the labyrinth and required much questioning and manoeuvring before we could locate it. When at last we found the little sign announcing his residence we discovered that we had come too early. We killed an hour or so strolling about the quarter, marvelling not so much at the squalor but at the pathetically human efforts that had been made to adorn and beautify these miserable shacks. Despite the fact that it had been created out of the rubbish heap there was more charm and character to this little village than one usually finds in a modern city. It evoked books, paintings, dreams, legends: it evoked such names as Lewis Carroll, Hieronymus Bosch, Breughel, Max Ernst, Hans Reichel, Salvador Dali, Goya, Giotto, Paul Klee, to mention but a few. In the midst of the most terrible poverty and suffering there nevertheless emanated a glow which was holy; the surprise of finding a cow or a sheep in the same room with a mother and child gave way instantly to a feeling of reverence. Nor did one have the slightest desire to laugh at seeing a squalid hut surmounted by an improvised solarium made of pieces of tin. What shelter there was was shared alike and this shelter included provision for the birds of the air and the animals of the field. Only in sorrow and suffering does man draw close to his fellow man; only then, it seems, does his life become beautiful. Walking along a sunken planked street I stopped a moment to gaze at the window of a bookshop, arrested by the sight of those lurid adventure magazines which one never expects to find in a foreign land but which flourish everywhere in every land, in every tongue almost. Conspicuous among them was a brilliant red-covered volume of Jules Verne, a Greek edition of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” What impressed me at the moment was the thought that the world in which this fantastic yarn lay buried was far more fantastic than anything Jules Verne had imagined. How could anyone possibly imagine, coming out of the sky from another planet in the middle of the night, let us say, and finding himself in this weird community, that there existed on this earth other beings who lived in towering skyscrapers the very materials of which would baffle the mind to describe? And if there could be such a gulf between two worlds lying in such proximity what might be the gulf between the present world and the world to come? To see even fifty or a hundred years ahead taxes our imagination to the utmost; we are incapable of seeing beyond the repetitious cycle of war and peace, rich and poor, right and wrong, good and bad. Look twenty thousand years ahead: do you still see battleships, skyscrapers, churches, lunatic asylums, slums, mansions, national frontiers, tractors, sewing machines, canned sardines, little liver pills, etc. etc.? How will these things be eradicated? How will the new world, brave or poor, come about? Looking at the beautiful volume of Jules Verne I seriously asked myself the question—how will it come about? I wondered, indeed, if the elimination of these things ever seriously occupies our imagination. For as I stood there daydreaming I had the impression that everything was at a standstill, that I was not a man living in the twentieth century but a visitor from no century seeing what he had seen before and would see again and again, and the thought that that might be possible was utterly depressing.