free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
Greek, on the assumption I suppose that enough Greeks knew English.
From time to time he would drop in and ask me to make telephone calls
for him in Greek.
The sad thing was that, despite his circumscribed access to Greeks
and their history and language, he became violently anti-Greek. His
attitudes to American domestic issues were those of a liberal and nuclear
disarmer. Yet his attitude to the Greeks shared some of the characteristics
of racial prejudice, and was based on the same cause – fear of
difference. I remember one occasion at a party when he attempted to
demolish the myth that the Greeks were courageous – in front of Greeks
– by pointing out that it took the Germans only three days to sweep
through mainland Greece. One could hardly find a clearer example of
prejudice.
He was exceptional, of course. But the cause of his prejudice –
failure to latch on to any kind of reality, political, cultural or linguistic,
in Greece; failure even to try – works also in others. This is partly why
Athens is in some ways an unsatisfactory city. But there is another
reason; Athens lacks solidity, it lacks a heart. There is not the presence
of that tradition embodied in palaces, cathedrals and ruined monuments
which makes Rome a capital city, where you can walk the streets
and feel the past stretching back in an unbroken chain whose links are
these memorials of unforgotten craftsmen. Always in Athens you are
conscious of the long gap, the void which opens up after Hadrian’s
magnificent adornment and yawns until the neo-classical libraries and
university buildings begin to sprout in the last century. Constantinople
is the City. Athens is a construction in concrete in which the shambling
Plaka twines itself into the roots of the Acropolis like a tough and lovely
creeper at the foot of some marvellous tree.
And still it draws like a magnet, it fascinates. Like Cavafy’s Alexandria
:
The city will follow you. You will walk the same streets.
And in the same neighbourhoods you will grow old.
And it is in these same houses you will turn grey.
Always it is at this city you will arrive. Elsewhere – hold out no hopes–
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
Just as you have destroyed your life here
In this little corner, so you have ruined it in all the world.
In this way Athens, and Crete, and Greece herself all infiltrate our
bodies, so that we carry them in us for ever. Those who have lived
there know this well. And I knew too that when I went to Crete I was
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