free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

Epilogue
Tennyson’s Ulysses – ‘to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond
the utmost bounds of human thought’ – is exactly that of Odysseus: to
go beyond bounds, to merge with what one meets.
Kazantzakis wrote in his introduction to zorba the Greek:
The greatest benefactors in my life have been travels and dreams. Of men,
living and dead, very few have helped my struggle. If however I wished to
distinguish those men who have imprinted themselves most deeply on my soul,
perhaps there would be three or four – Homer, Bergson, Nietzsche and Zorba.
The first has been for me the calm light-filled eye – like the sun – which
illumines everything with redeeming light. Bergson delivered me from the unresolved
philosophical torments which tyrannized over me in early youth.
Nietzsche enriched me with new torments and. taught me to turn misfortune,
unhappiness and uncertainty into pride. And Zorba taught me to love life and
not to fear death.
Zorba also inspired Kazantzakis’s most delightful book. Anyone who
loves Crete must read Zorba the Greek, for it is a poem fashioned out of
nostalgia for the island and for Zorba himself, both lost to Kazantzakis.
‘This Cretan landscape seemed like good prose,’ he wrote. ‘Well
fashioned, economical, shorn of excessive riches, powerful and controlled.
. . . it said what it wished to say with manly austerity. But
between its austere lines you could discern in this Cretan landscape
unexpected sensitivity and tenderness – the lemons and oranges
smelled sweet in sheltered hollows, and beyond, from the boundless
sea, came an endless stream of poetry.’ In this landscape Kazantzakis
fell under Zorba’s spell. It could easily have been a bore, this story of
the penpushing intellectual’s admiration for a ‘natural’ man. But it
succeeds just because Kazantzakis k not out to convince anybody– he
loves Zorba too much for that. He is one of the few authors who seem
genuinely, physically to love their characters, whether they be real or
imagined. And he loved the memory of Zorba especially, it seems to
me, because Zorba remained, even after they had parted, the antithesis
of Kazantzakis.
One day in Berlin Kazantzakis received a telegram. ‘Have found
most beautiful green stone, come at once. Zorba.’ It was winter, bitter
cold, the snow was falling, there was famine in Berlin. At first Kazantzakis
was angry at this message which arrived when people were dying
all around him. Curses on beauty: it is heartless, and human pain is of
no concern to it. Then, suddenly, he realized that the inhuman message
answered to an inhuman urge in himself. He wanted to go. But Kanzatzakis
stayed. He failed to make the noble, unreasonable gesture, and
followed the cold voice of logic. He wrote to Zorba, who replied,
171