free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
‘The Peloponnese. Now go away!’
‘Ah, Peloponnesos. You comestay in Piraeus. I pay hotel, you stay, eh?’
I pointed to the head of my school’s classics department who lay
peacefully sleeping about three yards away. ‘Shut up. You’ll wake the
whole ship up. Now get out and go away!’ I made a manic gesture
sufficiently violent to get him to leave. This was my first experience of
an offer of the hospitality for which Greeks are famous. I kept a diary on
that trip; it reads for the next day: ‘I wouldn’t have missed that odd
experience. Rest of night uneventful, but deck rather hard on the hip.’
It was, I suppose, the desire to know the Cretans at least as well as
this Cretan knew the English – and to know them in a rather different
way, I must add - that led me back to Crete.
Three years later I was back, with a friend, Brian Saperia, who
wished to join me in recording Cretan folk music. There was something
arbitrary about the whole enterprise. We might just as well, I feel now,
have found ourselves in Epirus doing social work, or in Africa measureing
skulls, as in Crete recording music. We were bored and dissatisfied
with the university, and wanted to do something. Whether you travel to
distant parts, as in the old days, because you have been jilted, or as
nowadays, because the materialism and mechanism of our civilization
become oppressive, the effective motive is likely to be frustration. And
whether he knows it or not, the traveller is often searching for a kind of
power, a charm derived from foreign lands, which will send him home
changed, invested with an authority which sets him apart from the nineto-fivers.
When I came back from Crete in 1960 and read the remarks
of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on the subject of
travellers, I had the astonishing feeling that he was analysing me.
Lévi-Strauss compares foreign travel with the initiation ordeals of
certain primitive tribes. In adolescence the youth will separate himself
from the tribe, plunge himself into a way of life where the rules and
values of the tribe count for nothing. He will isolate himself on a raft,
or in the mountains, going for weeks without cooked food, attempting
to sever contact with his environment by physical privations such as
freezing baths, or torment such as the cutting off of the finger-tips. In
the state of weakness and delirium which these hardships produce, the
youth hopes to see, in a vision, the spirit who is from now on to be his
guardian, and to discover the power, derived from that spirit, which
will define his rank and privileges when he returns to the tribe. The
strange thing about the initiation ordeal is that it is imposed by society.
Society itself sends out the young men beyond its well-defined borders,
to snatch power from the unknown territory, to free themselves for a
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