The Honeymoon Essays, part 3: What Happened to Greece?
Tourism of ruins; the abortion of Greece's great vision; beaches are evil
In The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller wrote sentimentally about the islands he loved. He wrote the book from New York City, after fleeing the looming dangers of the Second World War, isolated and depressed, far away from the romances of Europe that all his best writing came from. And of course, he noticed what we all notice when we visit Greece: What happened to the once greatest culture on earth, the place that birthed philosophy, mathematics, science, politics to create the world today as we know it? There was a great failure in their project, where the flamboyant dramaturges of the mind degraded into a cemetery for the passions, a place whose greatest asset are ruins from two-and-a-half thousand years ago, for people to come from all over the world to marvel at what a powerfully advanced place this used to be. And it’s been falling apart ever since. Miller wrote of this. “Until he [man] has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision.”
Today I’m writing from Paros, one of those islands in the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea, the famous Greek archipelago that everyone manages to haunt at least once in their lives, where you will stare out at the sea from your perch with the bubonic gore of a slave to its beautiful powers, photographing the quintessential white plaster stone buildings trimmed with blue outlines and maybe a big blue dome like a swelling ulcer pulsing against the setting sun. This is my third time on the islands, and they’re all varying iterations of the same template: clusters of white buildings stacked haphazardly up the hills from the beach, arid treeless terrenes of scrubby weeds rolling across the undulating passes of land, infestations of cats everywhere, missing eyes and tails, ripped ears, snot hanging surreptitiously from their noses, like the pets of pirates, almost no birds or lizards of any kind, no other animals larger than a hedgehog who peek their heads out at night. The actual populations of these islands are incredibly small, only the very old seem to have any appetite to remain this isolated from the rest of the world year round. On another nearby island, Milos, my wife and I waited over an hour to be seated for lunch, in a cloistered town with only a single resident who lives there year round. These places turn into ghost towns after we leave, shuttered fortresses in hibernation through the winter of storms.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Paradise of Storm to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.