free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
to. People do sleep together without being married in England more
than in Greece. It happens that we didn’t. It’s just that our customs
allow us to go on holidays together without even being engaged.’
They found this extraordinarily interesting and later repeated it all
to those who cared to hear throughout the village.
The mountains were closing in now, and the air became filled with
the scents of herb and scrub from the encroaching hillsides. Below us
wound the dry river bed, the straggling plane trees. As we passed the
church on the outskirts of Asi Gonia, Daskalomarkakis, encouraged by
his new insight into different social and cultural norms, suddenly asked:
‘Do you believe in a life after death?’
‘What?’
‘Because they say the soul goes on living for ever.’
‘That’s right,’ said the old man. ‘The soul is immortal, so how can it
die?’
This sounded like a variant of the ontological argument; I was not
prepared to go into defining properties and like abstractions.
‘But do you believe all that?’ said Daskalomarkakis,
‘I’m an agnostic,’ I said.
He saw I was trying to get out of it.
‘But look, if you’re under pressure, if you have to say yes or no, what
do you say?’
‘What do you say?’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘You know what the priests say, everyone says it in
fact, but – ’ and his face crinkled as if he had been let in on a secret
denied to the rest of us – ‘I’d say no.’
‘And so would I,’ I admitted.
The conversation interested me, not least because I had felt creeping
up on me that pseudo-respect for other sets of cultural values that is
difficult to repress. Why should one arrogantly try to protect those who
belong to a different society (which one respects) from one’s own different
views? Because this is a form of arrogance. It happened this time
that Daskalomarkakis and I agreed to differ from the norm. But on
other occasions I have often found myself trying to fit into Cretan
society by suppressing my own views. This can lead to absurdities – it
led, for instance, to my agreeing with Julie du Boulay, in a fit of weakmindedness,
that we should agree to be cousins, so as not to offend
Cretan susceptibilities with what must appear to them to be our immoral
proximity to each other. We had not reckoned on Cretan curiosity,
and so had not rehearsed our story well enough. Someone asked me
exactly what the relationship was. Well, I said, our fathers are brothers
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