Zorba the Greek by Kazantzakis
Ref: Nikos Kazantzakis (1952). Zorba the Greek. NY: Simon & Schuster.
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Summary
Written during the Nazi occupation of Greece, Kazantzakis writes about the teacher, learning from books and living his life in his head, and Zorba, taking every opportunity, and living his life and learning from the world.
“What can you say? So far as I know, Your Excellency has never gone hungry, never killed, never stolen, never committed adultery. So, what can you know about the world? Immature mind, inexperienced body.”
My life had taken the wrong path; my contact with fellow humans had ended up as an internal monologue. My degeneration was so great that if I were to choose between loving a woman or reading a good book about love, I would choose the book.
“Women galore, wine galore, sea galore, work galore. Work on full blast; wine on full blast; sex on full blast; no fear of God, no fear of the Devil—that’s the meaning of youth and strength.”
“You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.”
“Once more there sounded within me the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.”
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Sex
‘Don’t you fear God, you infidel?’ ‘Why should I fear God?’ ‘Because, you young Greek, whoever has the chance of sleeping with a woman and does not sleep with her commits a great sin. If a woman calls you to her bed and you do not go, your soul is destroyed! That woman will sigh at the moment of God’s great judgment and that sigh of the woman’s will throw you down into hell no matter who you are and how many good things you have done.’
Who created this labyrinth of uncertainty, this temple of arrogance, this pot filled with sins, this field sown with scandal greens, this hell’s mouth, this basket overbrimming with slyness, this poison that resembles honey, this chain that ties mortals to the world—women?”
“Oh, the poor fellow!” said Zorba with a sigh. “I’m the only one who knows how much he suffered. It’s true that he loved women, but not the way you pen pushers think—no, not at all! He felt sorry for them, understood the yearning of each and every one of them, sacrificed himself for them. Whenever he saw an old maid in some provincial backwater worrying herself sic k, or some tasty little wife who couldn’t fall asleep because her husband was away —bah! even if she wasn’t tasty, was a holy monster—he would cross himself, so caring was he for every soul, would change clothes, assume the features of the man whom the woman had in mind, and enter her room. He didn’t have any taste for love affairs, I tell you. He was often worn out, and with good reason: how could the poor fellow manage such a crowd! He was often listless, bored, unwell. Have you ever seen a billy goat, Boss, after he’s mounted a flock of nanny goats? He slobbers, his eyes are misted over and gummy, he coughs, makes raspy sounds, can hardly stand on his four feet. That’s just the way poor Zeus was quite often. He’d get back home at dawn and say, ‘Oh my, dear Christ, when can I get to bed and have some sleep? I can hardly stand on my two feet.’ And he’d always wipe away his slobber. But suddenly he would hear a sigh. Some woman down on earth had thrown b ack her sheets, gone out onto her verandah, and was moaning. Suddenly Zeus’s heart would begin to melt. ‘Oh well, let’s go back down to earth,’ he’d murmur, ‘let’s go back down once again, poor me. A woman sighed. Let’s go down and console her.’ Until all these women undid him. His back was killing him, he was so tired. He vomited repeatedly, suffered paralysis, and kicked the bucket. Then came his successor, Christ. Seeing the holy mess the former god was in, he proclaimed, ‘Steer clear of women!’
When I, too, become a paralytic from my extensive good works and kick the bucket, Peter the doorkeeper will open Paradise for me and say, ‘Enter, amorous Zorba, enter, Zorba the great martyr, go and lie down next to your colleague Zeus to get some rest in your turn, O blessed one. You suffered exceedingly in your life.’
You should also know that a true woman is more pleased by the pleasure she gives to a man than by the pleasure she takes from him.”
After a bit: “When Bouboulina was alive, as you were saying, no Canavaro gave her as much pleasure as I did, I who you see here: old, ragged Zorba. You’ll ask why? Because the Canavaros kissed her and the very moment they were kissing her they were thinking of their fleets and Crete and their kings and stripes and wives. But I forgot everything, everything, and she, the scamp, understood. What you need to learn, dear savant, is that no greater pleasure than this exists for a woman.
He had never heard a woman address him imploringly without sensing his world being turned upside down. He could be drowned by a single feminine tear.
Women are a mystery, Boss. They fall a thousand times and rise up virgin again a thousand times.
Me, Zorba, and the everlasting business: females.
Catching my breath, I thought, “They are wild beasts, wild beasts, and they know it. Compared to them, males are such feeble, transient, foolish, inane creatures without endurance. These wild beasts resemble various female insects—the praying mantis, the grasshopper, the spider—female insects that, insatiable at dawn, feed by devouring males.”
Woe to the man, Boss, who could have slept with a woman and did not; woe to the woman who could have slept with a man and did not.
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Misc Quotes
This world offers many pleasures: women, fruit, ideas. But I think no pleasure exists that plunges a person’s heart into Paradise more than the joy of cutting across this sea (Aegean) on a gentle autumn day, murmuring the name of each island. Nowhere else are you transported from truth to dream with such serenity and ease. Boundaries fade; the mast of even the most dilapidated s hip sprouts buds and grapes. Here in Greece, truly, necessity blossoms most certainly into miracle.
The greatest prophet can offer humankind nothing more than a slogan, and the vaguer the slogan, the more prophetic it becomes.
“Half-finished jobs, conversations, sins, and virtues are what have brought the world to its present mess. Reach the end, everyone! Strike; win the fight! God detests the half-Devil more than the Devil-in-chief.”
Even if Sisyphus succeeds in pushing the rock all the way to the top of the hill, he would then seek a higher hill, start a new ascent, for the ascent itself is the enlightenment. It is the pushing, the sweat, the struggle that transubstantiates flesh into spirit, darkness into light, mud, blood, desires, and visions into enlightenment.
Each person’s life is a rail line going up and down. Sensible people travel it using the brakes. But I—and this is where I excel, Boss—I chucked the brakes a long time ago because I’m not afraid of pileups. We working men call a pileup simply a derailment. Curses on me if I pay attention to the pileups I cause. I keep running day and night on the double, doing as I please, and who cares if, crashing, I splinter into a scrap heap? What do I have to lose? Nothing. Suppose I advance sensibly? Won’t I crash? I will. So, then, full steam ahead!
When everything goes wrong for us, what a joy it is to test our soul’s endurance and value. It seems that an invisible, omnipotent enemy—called God by some, Satan by others—pounces to throw us down. Yet we stand erect. Thus whenever we are internally victorious, even though we are utterly defeated outwardly, the true human being feels indescribable pride and joy. The outer misfortune is transformed into the highest, most obdurate form of bliss.
You’ve seen, haven’t you, Zorba, what happens when you place a magnifying glass in sunshine and gather its rays into just a single spot? The spot soon bursts into flames. Why? Because the sun’s power is not dispersed but is entirely concentrated on that spot. The same happens with the human mind. You produce miracles if you cast your mind on one and only one thing. Do you understand, Zorba?”
“I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.”
“For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.”
“Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all … is not to have one.”
“I should learn to run, to wrestle, to swim, to ride horses, to row, to drive a car, to fire a rifle. I should fill my soul with flesh. I should fill my flesh with soul. In fact, I should reconcile at last within me the two internal antagonists.”
“How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!”
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