Summary
Take Awareness, personify it in Zorba, wrap it in an early 19th-century Greek setting and have him talk with and share experiences with a literate everyday man. A novel with philosophical components that’s easy and entertaining to read. The writing has a lot of personality so it’s not for everyone (but it is for me).
Table of Contents
Summary Notes
I
If only I could live again the moment of that anger which surged up in me when my friend called me a bookworm! I recalled then that all my disgust at the life I had been leading was personified in those words.
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! In that day of separation, my friend had helped me to see clearly. I was relieved. As I now knew the name of my affliction, I could perhaps conquer it more easily. It was no longer elusive and incorporeal; it had assumed a name and a shape, and it would be easier for me to combat it.
I had decided to change my mode of life. ‘Till now,’ I told myself, ‘you have only seen the shadow, and been well content with it; now, I am going to lead you to the substance.’
Since I learnt to play the santuri, I’ve been a different man.
When I’m feeling down, or when I’m broke, I play the santuri and it cheers me up.
When I’m playing, you can talk to me, I hear nothing, and even if I hear, I can’t speak.
It’s no good my trying. I can’t!’ ‘But why, Zorba?’ ‘Oh, don’t you see? A passion, that’s what it is!
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.
I tell you plainly from the start, I must be in the mood. Let’s have that quite clear. If you force me to, it’ll be finished. As regards those things, you must realise, I’m a man.
II
That’s what liberty is, I thought. To have a passion, to amass pieces of gold and suddenly to conquer one’s passion and throw the treasure to the four winds.
Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the tether of our slavery? Then we can enjoy ourselves and frolic in a more spacious arena and die without having come to the end of the tether. Is that, then, what we call liberty?
III
One day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. “What, grandad!” I exclaimed. “Planting an almond tree?” And he, bent as he was, turned round and said: “My son, I carry on as if I should never die.” I replied: “And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.” Which of us was right, boss?’ He looked at me triumphantly and said:
“That’s where I’ve got you!’ I kept silent. Two equally steep and bold paths may lead to the same peak. To act as if death did not exist, or to act thinking every minute of death, is perhaps the same thing.
IV
Things we are accustomed to, and which we pass by indifferently, suddenly rise up in front of Zorba like fearful enigmas. Seeing a woman pass by, he stops in consternation.
‘What is that mystery?’ he asks. ‘What is a woman, and why does she turn our heads?
Just tell me, I ask you, what’s the meaning of that?’ He interrogates himself with the same amazement when he sees a man, a tree in blossom, a glass of cold water. Zorba sees everything every day as if for the first time.
I asked questions, gossiped, and got to know every man’s history – how many children they had to feed, sisters to be married, helpless old relations; their cares, illnesses and worries.
‘Don’t delve like that into their histories, boss,’ Zorba would say, scowling. ‘You’ll be taken in, with your soft heart, and you’ll like them more than’s good for them or for our work. Whatever they do, you’ll find excuses for them. Then, heaven help us, they’ll scamp their work, do it any old how. Heaven help them, too, you’d better realise that.
When the boss is hard, the men respect him, they work. When the boss is soft, they leave it all to him, and have an easy time, Get me?’
The house appears empty, but it contains everything needful, so few in reality are the true necessities of man.
Let people be, boss; don’t open their eyes. And supposing you did, what’d they see? Their misery! Leave their eyes closed, boss, and let them go on dreaming!’ He was silent a moment and scratched his head. He was thinking.
‘Unless/ he said at last, ‘unless ‘Unless what? Let’s have it!’ ‘Unless when they open their eyes you can show them a better world than the darkness in which they’re gallivanting at present… Can you?’ I did not know. I was fully aware of what would be destroyed. I did not know what would be built out of the ruins. No one can know that with any degree of certainty, I thought. The old world is tangible, solid, we live in it and are struggling with it every moment – it exists. The world of the future is not yet born, it is elusive, fluid, made of the light from 67 which dreams are woven; it is a cloud buffeted by violent winds – love, hate, imagination, luck, God … The greatest prophet on earth can give men no more than a watchword, and the vaguer the watchword the greater the prophet
That man has not been to school, I thought, and his brains have not been perverted.
He has had all manner of experiences; his mind is open and his heart has grown bigger, without his losing one ounce of his primitive boldness. All the problems which we find so complicated or insoluble he cuts through as if with a sword, like Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian knot. It is difficult for him to miss his aim, because his two feet are held firmly planted on the ground by the weight of his whole body. African savages worship the serpent because its whole body touches the ground and it must, therefore, know all the earth’s secrets. It knows them with its belly, with its tail, with its head. It is always in contact or mingled with the Mother. The same is true of Zorba. We educated people are just empty-headed birds of the air.
VI
I at last realised that eating was a spiritual function and that meat, bread and wine were the raw materials from which the mind is made.
Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humour, and others, I’m told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men. I’m not one of the worst, boss, nor yet one of the best. I’m somewhere between the two. What I eat I turn into work and good humour. That’s not too bad, after all!’ , He looked at me wickedly and started laughing.
‘As for you, boss,’ he said, ‘I think you do your level best to turn what you eat into God.
But you can’t quite manage it, and that torments you. The same thing’s happening to you as happened to the crow.’ ‘What happened to the crow, Zorba?’ ‘Well, you see, he used to walk respectably, properly -well, like a crow. But one day he got it into his head to try and strut about like a pigeon. And from that time on the poor fellow couldn’t for the life of him recall his own way of walking. He was all mixed up, don’t you see? He just hobbled about.’
My life is wasted, I thought. If only I could take a cloth and wipe out all I have learnt, all I have seen and heard, and go to Zorba’s school and start the great, the real alphabet! What a different road I would choose. I should keep my five senses perfectly trained, and my whole body, too, so that it would enjoy and understand. 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 eternal antagonists.
VII
Religion is opium for the masses.
VIII
‘Confucius says: “Many seek happiness higher than man; others beneath him. But happiness is the same height as man.” That is true. So there must be a happiness to suit every man’s stature. Such is, my dear pupil and master, my happiness of the day.
I anxiously measure it and measure it again, to see what my stature of the moment is.
For, you know this very well, man’s stature is not always the same.
‘How the soul of man is transformed according to the climate, the silence, the solitude, or the company in which it lives!
‘You certainly must consider the life you lead a happy one. And since you consider it such, such it is.
The good master desires no greater recompense than this: to form a pupil who surpasses him.
IX
I hung the lamp up again on the nail and watched Zorba work. He was completely absorbed in his task; he thought of nothing else; he was one with the earth, the pick and the coal. He and the hammer and nails were united in the struggle with the wood.
He suffered with the bulging roof of the gallery. He sparred with the mountainside to obtain its coal by cunning and force. Zorba could feel matter with a sure and infallible instinct, and he struck his blows shrewdly where it was weakest and could be conquered. And, as he appeared then, covered and plastered with dirt, with only the whites of his eyes gleaming, he seemed to me to be camouflaged as coal, to have become coal itself, in order to be able to approach his adversary unawares and penetrate its inner defences.
‘Every one follows his own 124 bent. Man is like a tree. You’ve never quarrelled with a fig tree because it doesn’t bear cherries, have you?
X
This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To take part in the Christmas festivities and, after eating and drinking well, to escape on your own far from all the snares, to have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right: and to realise of a sudden that, in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy-tale.’
My indiscreet desire of that morning to pry into and know the future before it was born suddenly appeared to me a sacrilege.
I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as the butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them.
Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath. In vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.
That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realise 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.
XI
I looked at Zorba in the light of the moon and admired the jauntiness and simplicity with which he adapted himself to the world around him, the way his body and soul formed one harmonious whole, and all things – women, bread, water, meat, sleep -blended happily with his flesh and became Zorba. I had never seen such a friendly accord between a man and the universe.
XII
While going down a slope, Zorba kicked against a stone, which went rolling downhill. He stopped for a moment in amazement, as if he were seeing this astounding spectacle for the first time in his life.
He looked round at me, and in his look I discerned faint consternation.
‘Boss, did you see that?’ he said at last. ‘On slopes, stones come to life again.’ I said nothing, but I felt a deep joy. This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything – as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.
The universe for Zorba, as for the first men on earth, was a weighty, intense vision;
the stars glided over him, the sea broke against his temples. He lived the earth, the water, the animals and God, without the distorting intervention of reason.
As soon as I arrived here I drew a circle, in the way you taught me, and called that circle “my duty”. I said:
“If I save this entire circle, I am saved; if I do not save it, I am lost!”
Action, dear inactive master, action; there is no other salvation.
I have no confidence in the secret forces which are said to protect men. I believe in the blind forces which hit out right and left, without malice, without purpose, killing whoever happens to be in their way.
XIII
‘I have realised for some rime I didn’t come into this world to be a horse, or an ox.
Only animals live to eat. To escape the above accusation, I invent jobs for myself day and night. I risk my daily bread for an idea, I turn the proverb round and say: “Better be a lean moorhen on a pond than a fat sparrow in a cage.”
Lots reflect hard; I have no need to reflect. I don’t rejoice over the good and don’t despair over the bad. If I hear that the Greeks have taken Constantinople, it’s just the same to me as if the Turks were taking Athens.
It makes no difference whether I have a woman or whether I don’t, whether I’m honest or not, whether I’m a pasha or a street-porter. The only thing that makes any difference is whether I’m alive or dead.
When he writes, this ignorant workman breaks his pens in his impetuosity. Like the first men to cast off their monkey-skins, or like the great philosophers, he is dominated by the basic problems of mankind. He lives them as if they were immediate and urgent necessities. Like the child, he sees everything for the first time. He is for ever astonished and 165 wonders why and wherefore. Everything seems miraculous to him, and each morning when he opens his eyes he sees trees, sea, stones and birds, and is amazed.
‘What is this miracle?’ he cries. ‘What are these mysteries called: trees, sea, stones, birds?’
XV
I’ve got everything I want: bread, cheese, olives, my knife, leather for my boots and an awl, and water in my bottle, everything … except a cigarette! And it’s as though I’d got nothing at all!
‘What is your favourite dish, grandad?’ ‘All of them, my son. It’s great sin to say this is good and that is bad.’ ‘Why? Can’t we make a choice?’ ‘No, of course we can’t.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because there are people who are hungry.’ I was silent, ashamed. My heart had never been able to reach that height of nobility and compassion.
Savages believe that when a musical instrument is no longer used for religious rites it loses its divine power and begins to give out harmonious sounds.
Religion, in the same way, had become degraded in me: it had become art.
‘She is thirty-five/ added the Mother Superior with a sigh. ‘An unhappy age – very difficult! May the Holy Martyred Virgin come to her aid and cure her! In ten or fifteen years she will be cured.’ Ten or fifteen years,’ I murmured, aghast.
‘What are ten or fifteen years?’ asked the Mother Superior severely. ‘Think of eternity!’ I made no answer. I knew that eternity is each minute that 188 passes.
Night had fallen. Two or three crows were hurrying back to their nests; owls were coming out of the hollow trees to hunt. Snails, caterpillars, worms, field-mice were coming out of the earth to be eaten by the owls.
The mysterious snake that devours its own tail enclosed me in its circle: the earth brings to life and devours her own children, then bears more and devours them in their turn.
As a child, then, I had almost fallen into the well. When grown up, I nearly fell into the word ‘eternity’, and into quite a number of other words too – ‘love’, ‘hope’, ‘country’, ‘God’. As each word was conquered and left behind, I had the feeling that I had escaped a danger and made some progress. But no, I was only changing words and calling it deliverance. And there I had been, for the last two years, hanging over the edge of the word ‘Buddha’.
But I now feel sure – Zorba be praised – that Buddha will be the last well of all, the last word-precipice, and then I shall be delivered for ever. For ever? That is what we say each time.
XVII
‘When I have a longing for something myself/ he said, ‘do you know what I do? I cram myself chockful of it, and so I get rid of it and don’t think about it any longer. Or, if I do, it makes me retch.
I still drink and smoke, but at any second, if I want to, whoop! I can cut it out. I’m not ruled by passion. It’s the same with my country. I thought too much about it, so I stuffed myself up to the neck with it, spewed it up, and it’s never troubled me since.’
XVIII
‘You appear to be a cultured young man/ the bishop said to me. ‘Here I can’t find anyone to talk to. I have three theories that help to make my life agreeable; I would like to tell you about them, my child.’ He didn’t wait for my reply but began straight away:
‘My first theory is this: the shape of flowers influences their colour; their colour influences their properties. Thus it is that each flower has a different effect on a man’s body, and therefore on his soul. That is why we must be extremely careful in passing through a field when the flowers are in bloom.’ He stopped as though waiting for my opinion. I could see the little old man wandering through a field, searching the ground, with secret excitement, for the shapes and colours of the flowers. The poor old man must tremble with mystic awe; in the spring the fields must be peopled for him with many-coloured devils and angels.
“This is my second theory: every idea that has a real influence has also a real existence. It is really there, it does not float invisibly in the atmosphere – it has a real body – eyes, a mouth, feet, a stomach. It is male or female and therefore runs after men or women, as the case may be. That is why the Gospel says: “The Word became flesh…”
He looked anxiously at me again.
‘My third theory/ he went on hurriedly, as he could not bear my silence, ‘is this: there is some Eternity even in our ephemeral lives, only it is very difficult for us to discover it alone. Our daily cares lead us astray. A few people only, the flower of humanity, manage to live an eternity even in their transitory lives on this earth. Since all the others would therefore be lost, God had mercy on them and sent them religion – thus the crowd is able to live in eternity, too.’
XX
I was envious of the man. He had lived with his flesh and blood -fighting, killing, kissing – all that I had tried to learn through pen and ink alone. All the problems I was trying to solve point by point in my solitude and glued to my chair, this man had solved up in the pure air of the mountains with his sword.
Every fifty yards the workmen dug a hole, put in a post, and went on, making a bee-line for the summit of the hill. Zorba measured, calculated and gave orders; he did not eat, smoke, or take a rest the whole day long. He was completely absorbed in the job.
‘It’s all because of doing things by halves,’ he would often say to me, and ‘saying things by halves, being good by halves, that the world is in the mess it’s in today. Do things properly by God! One good knock for each nail and you’ll win through! God hates a half-devil ten times more than an arch-devil!’
XXII
I lay down on my bed, turned out the lamp and once more began, in my wretched, inhuman way, to transpose reality, removing blood, flesh and bones and reduce it to the abstract, link it with universal laws, until I came to the awful conclusion that what had happened was necessary. And, what is more, that it contributed to the universal harmony. I arrived at this final and abominable consolation: it was right that all that had happened should have happened.
The widow’s murder entered my brain – the hive in which for years all poisons had been changed into honey – and threw it into confusion. But my philosophy immediately seized upon the dreadful warning, surrounded it with images and artifice and quickly made it harmless. In the same way, bees encase the starving drone in wax when it comes to steal their honey.
XXIV
Who was the sage who tried to teach his disciples to do voluntarily what the law ordered should be done? To say ‘yes’ to necessity and change the inevitable into something done of their own free will? That is perhaps the only human way to deliverance. It is a pitiable way, but there is no other.
But what of revolt? The proud quixotic reaction of mankind to conquer Necessity and make external laws conform to the internal laws of the soul, to deny all that is and create a new world according to the laws of one’s own heart, which are contrary to the inhuman laws of nature – to create a new world which is purer, better and more moral than the one that exists?
‘A fresh road, and fresh plans!’ he cried. ‘I’ve stopped thinking all the time of what happened yesterday. And stopped asking myself what’s going to happen tomorrow.
What’s happening today, this minute, that’s what I care 293 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!”‘
Did you notice, boss?’ he said. ‘His devil’s dead. And now he’s empty, poor fellow, completely empty, finished! He will be just like everybody else from now on!’ He thought for a moment or two.
‘Do you think, boss, that this devil of his was … ?’ 298 ‘Of course,’ I replied. “The idea of burning the monastery had possessed him; now he’s burnt it he’s calmed. That idea wanted to eat meat, drink wine, ripen and turn into action. The other Zaharia had no need of wine or meat. He matured by fasting.’
‘Why, I think you’re right, boss! I think I must have five or six demons inside me!’ ‘We’ve all got some, Zorba, don’t you worry. And the more we have, the better. The main thing is that they should all aim at the same end, even if they do go different ways about it.’
T think, Zorba – but I may be wrong – that there are three kinds of men: those who make it their aim, as they say, to live their lives, eat, drink, make love, grow rich, and famous; then come those who make it their aim not to live their own lives but to concern themselves with the lives of all men -they feel that all men are one and they try to enlighten them, to love them as much as they can and do good to them; finally there are those who aim at living the life of the entire universe – everything, men, animals, trees, stars, we are all one, we are all one substance involved in the same terrible struggle. What struggle? … Turning matter into spirit.’
Listen, little one: neither the seven storeys of heaven nor the seven storeys of the earth are enough to contain God; but a man’s heart can contain him. So be very careful, Alexis – and may my blessing go with you -never to wound a man’s heart!”‘
If only I could never open my mouth, I thought, until the abstract idea had reached its highest point – and had become a story! But only the great poets reach a point like that, or a people, after centuries of silent effort.
I weighed Zorba’s words – they were rich in meaning and had a warm earthy smell. You felt they came up from the depths of his being and that they still had a human warmth. My words were made of paper. They came down from my head, scarcely splashed by a spot of blood. If they had any value at all it was to that mere spot of blood they owed it.
XXV
I had rarely felt so full of joy in my life. It was no ordinary joy, it was a sublime, absurd and unjustifiable gladness. Not only unjustifiable, contrary to all justification. This time I had lost everything – my money, my men, the line, the trucks;
we had constructed a small port and now we had nothing to export. It was all lost.
Well, it was precisely at that moment that I felt an unexpected sense of deliverance.
As if in the hard, sombre labyrinth of necessity I had discovered liberty herself playing happily in a corner. And I played with her.
When everything goes wrong, what a joy to test your soul and see if it has endurance and courage! An invisible and all-powerful enemy – some call him God, others the Devil, seems to rush upon us to destroy us; but we are not destroyed.
Each time that within ourselves we are the conquerors, although externally utterly defeated, we human beings feel an indescribable pride and joy. Outward calamity is transformed into a supreme and unshakable felicity.
‘We have reached the frontiers of Georgia; we have escaped the Kurds and all’s well. I at last know what happiness really is. Because it’s only now that I have real experi-ence of the old maxim: Happiness is doing your duty, and the harder the duty the greater the happiness.
All these messages, I thought, are born of our own inner anxiety, and in our sleep assume the brilliant garb of a symbol. But we ourselves are the ones who create them…. I grew calmer. Reason was calling my heart to order, clipping the wings of that strange palpitating bat, and clipping and clipping until it could fly no more.
XXVI
A man’s head is like a grocer; it keeps accounts: I’ve paid so much and earned so much and that means a profit of this much or a loss of that much! The head’s a careful little shopkeeper; it never risks all it has, always keeps something in reserve. It never breaks the string. Ah no! It hangs on tight to it, the bastard! If the string slips out of its grasp, the head, poor devil, is lost, finished! But if a man doesn’t break the string, tell me, what flavour is left in life? The flavour of 323 camomile, weak camomile tea! Nothing like rum – that makes you see life inside out!’
‘You understand, and that’s why you’ll never have any peace. If you didn’t understand, you’d be happy! What d’you lack? You’re young, you have money, health, you’re a good fellow, you lack nothing. Nothing, by thunder! Except just one thing – folly! And when that’s missing, boss, well…’ He shook his big head and was silent again.
I nearly wept. All that Zorba said was true. As a child I had been full of mad impulses, superhuman desires, I was not content with the world. Gradually, as time went by, I grew calmer. I set limits, separated the possible from the impossible, the human from the divine, I held my kite tightly, so that it should not escape.