Zorba and the Acropolis

I recently had the rare pleasure of finishing a foreign book in the country in which it was set. ‘Zorba the Greek’ may be largely set in Crete whereas I was in Athens, but I thought I would be close enough to set a feel for the spirit of the novel. Strangely the effects of the book and the city were totally at odds with each other. The contrast was so stark I felt compelled to choose between two very different, very Greek, attitudes to life.

Athens is a sweaty, packed city. Typically Mediterranean yet lacking the beautiful architecture or coast line that normally redeems such places. What it does have is the Acropolis – literally high city – which no picture or written description can fully prepare a person for. The rough yellowy orange rock, on which the acropolis and its structures – known as the Parthenon – sit, juts out violently from the ground. This makes it both highly visible and, more relevant at the point of construction, highly defensible. The effect is that over much of the unpleasantness in Athens looms a structure of exquisite and ancient beauty. The age of the structures has an effect analogous to standing next to a sky scraper; whilst the sky scraper reinforces one’s insignificance in a physical sense, the Parthenon is a constant reminder to tourists and Athenians alike that our time on this planet is equally insignificant. The age of the structure (around 2500 years) seems almost incomprehensible but can be contextualised when you consider that, not only was built on the site of an even earlier temple, but when the Roman Emperor Hadrian built his famous additions to Athens the Parthenon was already 700 years old.

Apart from being very beautiful and very old, when I walked around the Acropolis and the exhibits at the National Archaeological Museum I realised something else that sets them apart from typical ruins. All of us, from the sexy French students to the unmistakeably garbed American tourists, were somehow connected through these relics. Ironically the connection has nothing to do with pots, or statues, or even temples being viewed. Yes Athens was for a time the centre of a powerful Empire but what truly distinguished it was what was happening while the pots and statues and temples were being built and wars were being fought. Namely that a group of men started to ask questions about the nature of the world, about what we should and shouldn’t do, how we should rule ourselves, what beauty is. The effect of these people was not felt through pots and temples but through what they wrote and said. It seemed standing on the top of the Acropolis that whatever branch your culture was on, ancient Greece was the trunk.

It is perhaps ironic then that Zorba, the dancing, drinking, widow bedding, eponymous hero of Kazantzakis’s novel, should be given the title ‘the Greek’ and yet spurn reading entirely. Surely the novel’s philosophical, academic narrator rather than Zorba is the true Greek?

ZORBA: Why do the young die? Why does anybody die, tell me?
NARRATOR: I don’t know.
ZORBA: What’s the use of all your damn books? If they don’t tell you that, what the hell do they tell you?

Sometimes even talking is too much for Zorba, and he resorts to dancing to express what he wants.

It is impossible not to be compelled by Zorba in the way he lives life without any sense of constraint. He has, as he would say, ‘cut the rope’. He is not a Raskolnikov, putting himself above the moral order, he simply lives each moment without regard to the past or future.

“A fresh road, and fresh plans!” he cried. “I’ve stopped thinking all

the time of what’s going to happen tomorrow. What’s happening

today, this minute, that’s what I care about. I say: ‘What are you

doing at this moment, Zorba?’ ‘I’m sleeping.’ ‘Well, sleep well.’

‘What are you doing at this moment, Zorba?’ ‘I’m working.’ ‘Well,

work well.’ ‘What are you doing at this moment, Zorba?’ ‘I’m kissing

a woman.’ ‘Well, kiss her well, Zorba! And forget all the rest while

you’re doing it; there’s nothing else on earth, only you and her! Get

on with it!’”

The narrator on the other hand had previously fantasised about setting up a ‘monastery’ of intellectuals totally cut off from the normal lived experience, an idea that Zorba predictably derides. The two become friends after the narrator hires Zorba to help manage a mine he has recently acquired as a means to break free from the constraints of academic life. This allows the novel to contrast two ways of living over a crisp Cretan canvas. I am told that Nietzsche discusses this issue – labelling the two approaches Apollonian and Dionysian respectively – if you’re interested in a fuller discussion of the topic.

Kazantzakis does push the argument a little to far occasion. The narrator’s constant commentary on how ‘free’ and exceptional Zorba is, is not only unsubtle but seems to put an undue burden on Kazantzakis’s descriptive powers.

The meaning of the words, art, love, beauty, purity, passion, all this was made clear to me by the simplest of human words uttered by this workman.

Lines like the above, for example, could never be fully sustained by any words or deeds of Zorba. A generous reading would be that Kazantzakis is also expressing the narrator’s naivety but this is undermined by Zorba’s undiminished status at the novel’s close.

Despite its short comings ‘Zorba’ is a great antidote to the flights of fancy Athens provokes. And yet as I left Greece I was in two minds, was the best life an Apollonian-Platonic existence of thought and reading, or a Dionysian one of Zorba-esque intensity? I landed in London with the depressing realisation that between Excel, Powerpoint, Pay As You Earn and other delights; I’d be lucky to experience either.