The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller Page A

and trees, about exotic fruits and inland voyages, about thyme and honey and the sap of the arbutus which makes one drunk, about islanders and highlanders, about the men of the Peloponnesus, about the crazy Russian woman who got moonstruck one night and threw off her clothes, how she danced about in the moonlight without a stitch on while her lover ran to get a strait-jacket. As he talked I was taking in for the first time with my own eyes the true splendor of the Attic landscape, observing with a growing exhilaration that here and there over the bare brown sward, amidst anomalous and eccentric growths, men and women, single, solitary figures, were strolling about in the clear fading light, and for some reason they appeared to me as being very Greek, walking as no other people walk, making clear-cut patterns in their ethereal meandering, patterns such as I had seen earlier in the day on the vases in the museum. There are so many ways of walking about and the best, in my opinion, is the Greek way, because it is aimless, anarchic, thoroughly and discordantly human. And this walking about on the brown sward amidst the eccentric, inelegant trees, the thick foliage flying like hair stiff-brushed in the well of the distant mountains, blended strangely with the Katsimbalistic monologue which I heard, digested and silently communicated to the Asiatic loungers below who were fading softly now in the dimming light…. On the high verandah in Amaroussion, just as the light from the other worlds began to shed its brilliance, I caught the old and the new Greece in their soft translucence and thus they remain in my memory. I realized at that moment that there is no old or new, only Greece, a world conceived and created in perpetuity. The man who was talking had ceased to be of human size or proportions but had become a Colossus whose silhouette swooned backwards and forwards with the deep droning rhythm of his drug-laden phrases. He went on and on and on, unhurried, unruffled, inexhaustible, inextinguishable, a voice that had taken form and shape and substance, a figure that had outgrown its human frame, a silhouette whose reverberations rumbled in the depths of the distant mountainsides.
     
     
    After about ten days of it in Athens I had a longing to return to Corfu. The war had begun, but since the Italians had announced their intention of remaining neutral I saw no reason why I should not return and make the most of the remaining days of Summer. When I arrived I found the Greeks still mobilized on the Albanian frontier, I had to get a pass from the police every time I went in or out of the town. Karamenaios was still patrolling the beach from his little reed hut at the edge of the water. Nicola would soon be returning to the village up in the mountains to open school. A wonderful period of solitude set in. I had nothing but time on my hands. Spiro sent his son Lillis out to give me some Greek lessons. Then Lillis went back to town and I was left alone. It was the first time in my life that I was truly alone. It was an experience which I enjoyed deeply. Towards evening I would stop by Nicola’s house to chat with him a few minutes and hear about the war. After dinner Karamenaios would drop in. We had about fifty words with which to make lingual currency. We didn’t even need that many, as I soon discovered. There are a thousand ways of talking and words don’t help if the spirit is absent. Karamenaios and I were eager to talk. It made little difference to me whether we talked about the war or about knives and forks. Sometimes we discovered that a word or phrase which we had been using for days, he in English or I in Greek, meant something entirely different than we had thought it to mean. It made no difference. We understood one another even with the wrong words. I could learn five new words in an evening and forget six or eight during my sleep. The important thing was the warm handclasp, the light in the eyes, the grapes which we