The Colossus of Maroussi (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The war will not only change the map of the world but it will affect the destiny of every one I care about. Already, even before the war had broken out, we were scattered to the four winds, those of us who had lived and worked together and who had no thought to do anything but what we were doing. My friend X, who used to be terrified at the very mention of war, had volunteered for service in the British Army; my friend Y, who was utterly indifferent and who used to say that he would go right on working at the Bibliothèque Nationale war or no war, joined the Foreign Legion; my friend Z, who was an out and out pacifist, volunteered for ambulance service and has never been heard of since; some are in concentration camps in France and Germany, one is rotting away in Siberia, another is in China, another in Mexico, another in Australia. When we meet again some will be blind, some legless, some old and white-haired, some demented, some bitter and cynical. Maybe the world will be a better place to live in, maybe it'll be just the same, maybe it'll be worse than it is now—who knows? The strangest thing of all is that in a universal crisis of this sort one instinctively knows that certain ones are doomed and that others will be spared.”

It is the morning of the first day of the great peace, the peace of the heart, which comes with surrender, I never knew the meaning of peace until I arrived at Epidaurus. Like everybody I had used the word all my life, without once realizing that I was using a counterfeit.” Like most of Miller's writing, from the joyous novel "Tropic of Cancer" to his trenchant essays, this book succeeds thanks to his freewheeling iconoclasm, his divine madness, and his inimitable language: His adventures from this point veer away from Lawrence Durrell, and it's not until later that he makes another appearance, as most of the book Miller is travelling with Katsimbalis, or on his own. They do meet up in the last part, however, for a few more adventures, as he seeks to cram a little more sight-seeing in before being forced to return to New York, much to his displeasure.Soon enough, a circle of artists, poets, and writers formed around Miller, Katsimbalis, and Durrell. The intellectual company was joined by Nobel laureate poet Giorgos Seferis and the renowned painter, sculptor, and writer Nikos Hatzikyriakos Ghikas.

They thought it a very interesting story. So that's how it was in America? Strange country ... anything could happen there. a b The Colossus of Maroussi By Henry Miller, Introduction by Will Self, Ian S. MacNiven, pp.10-11. Traveling at times with Katsimbalis, the poet Seferiades, and/or Lawrence Durrell, Miller moves from Athens and Corfu to Knossus and Delphi as if in search of dead Greek gods--and finds them reincarnate. Greece had done something for me which New York, nay, even America itself, could never destroy. Greece has made me free and whole…To those who think that Greece to-day is of no importance[,] let me say that no greater error could be committed.Hoffmann, Andy (2007). "On The Colossus of Maroussi: A Meditation on the End of War" (PDF). Salt Flats Annual. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 14 August 2021. The Colossus of Maroussi is an impressionist travelogue by American writer Henry Miller that was first published in 1941, by Colt Press of San Francisco. Set in pre-war Greece of 1939, it is ostensibly an exploration of the "Colossus" of the title, George Katsimbalis, a poet and raconteur. The work is frequently heralded as Miller's best. Lots of people get boring or overblown at times. No one’s perfect. But there is something else that I started to think about as I read parts 2 and 3, neither of which I liked as much as part 1, related to his appreciation of aesthetics, that I find a little more interesting. I’m not sure if it’s a fair criticism, or a criticism at all. I’m also not sure to what degree it would have stood out to me if I had never read Orwell’s ‘Inside the Whale’, which is ostensibly a review of Tropic of Cancer. But I have. The visit that Miller is describing to Greece, as I mentioned, took place in 1939. There were some pretty significant things happening in Europe at that time. Orwell, who published ‘Inside the Whale’ in 1940, says that while a contemporary writer is not required to write about world events, a writer who completely ignores them is generally an idiot. One of the things that seems to fascinate him about Miller is that Miller, who completely ignores world events, is clearly not an idiot, and that Tropic of Cancer is good. Orwell doesn’t reveal until part 3 of the essay that he and Miller have met: But it was Miller the poet and peacemaker who, I now think, made me reflect most. The fight, he said, was not against disease or poverty or even tyrants. These were just the symptoms of bad thinking. No, this is not your grandmother's travel writing, with its propriety, politeness, and "realistic" depictions, but word-pictures of an emotional landscape. That's the essence Miller strives to show: his subjective, experiential, inner reality. The subject here is Henry Miller, and what matters most is how these objects--the world--affect him.

On the eve of Clean Straw for Nothing’s publication, Clift overdosed on barbiatuates in Sydney. In a posthumously-published essay, My Husband George, Clift wrote: “I do believe that novelists must be free to write what they like, in any way they liked to write it, and after all who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?” I would set out in the morning and look for new coves and inlets in which to swim. There was never a soul about. I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To keep the mind, empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven't the faintest idea what it's about or why people should enjoy killing one another; you look at a place like Albania—it was constantly staring me in the eyes—and you say to yourself, yesterday it was Greek, today it's Italian, tomorrow it may be German or Japanese, and you let it be anything it chooses to be. When you're right with yourself it doesn't matter what flag is flying over your head or who owns what or whether you speak English or Monongahela. The absence of newspapers, the absence of news about what men are doing in different parts of the world to make life more livable or unlivable is the greatest single boon. If we could just eliminate newspapers a great advance would be made, I am sure of it. Newspapers engender lies, hatred, greed, envy, suspicion, fear, malice. We don't need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness. If we could all go on strike and honestly disavow all interest in what our neighbor is doing we might get a new lease of life. We might learn to do without telephones and radios and newspapers, without machines of any kind, without factories, without mills, without mines, without explosives, without battleships, without politicians, without lawyers, without canned goods, without gadgets, without razor blades -even or cellophane or cigarettes or money. This is a pipe dream, I know. People only go on strike for better working conditions, better wages, better opportunities to become something other than they are.“ The lawyer pulls out his wallet, extracts five Benjamins and slaps them on the counter. "Five hundred dollars doesn't begin to pay for my contempt of this court," he responds. Most of all, this book shows Miller in a different light, not limited by his fame for writing about sex (actually, most of his books are not) as he explores a new land, unknown to him until then. His ability to take the reader's hand and walk around the countryside, observe the people, customs, and scenery is combined with philosophy and his personal views (What else would you expect from Miller?).Phew. I read the book and immediately gave it away, not bearing for it to be unshared. I had entered a new realm. I had confirmed that my responsibilities were not just to myself, or to little England, but to the imagination and to something far greater than my present parlous condition. My immediate miserableness and loneliness were as nothing. And so what if I had nothing to show for life, no house or job, money or prospects? I too was a millionaire in spirit. I too had self-belief. Yes," I said, "a very strange country," and I thought to myself that it was wonderful not to be there any more and God willing I'd never return to it. Note: "Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue, doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips..." William Shakespeare, Richard II.) Vidal, Gore (9 September 1988). "From outlaws to intriguers". The Times Literary Supplement. p.979. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 14 August 2021. We followed the blue-collar dogs to the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the National Gardens. Inspired by what I had seen, the casts of the missing Parthenon marbles, I felt the strength of the argument for their return. The experience of the actual Acropolis, windswept, expensive, hustled by tour gangs, is grim: far better to stroll the floors of the museum, to take coffee in a room with a view. Police cars screech around the tight curves of the Acropolis ascent, and the peddlers, Asians with cheap guidebooks and concertinas of photographs, scatter into the bushes to regroup in time for the next coach.

Greece has been sneaking up on me lately. First, it was just reading about the debt crisis in the paper and discussing it with my father, whose take is that ‘the Greeks have gotten lazy.’ Then I agreed to read Herodotus’s The Histories with my buddy Kareem. All well and good- still nothing terribly suspicious. But then I started to read Henry Miller’s account of traveling throughout Greece in 1939, while sitting in a diner near my house. As I read, I heard one of the owners of the diner, a very tall and broad bald guy I hadn’t seen for a while, talking to his nephew behind the counter in a foreign language. Occasionally, he would lapse into English. I heard him say, “so someone drinking a Heineken, it’s like driving a Lamborghini…”, and “another thing is that now everyone tips…” Remembering that this guy was Greek, I concluded that he was probably speaking Greek to his nephew, and probably describing a trip he’d recently taken, perhaps to Athens (which made sense, since, again, I hadn’t seen him at the diner for a while), the same city that I was reading Miller’s account of visiting.He goes on to compare Miller to Jonah in the belly of the whale- passive, subjective, with no desire to alter the course of world events (and with the knowledge that he couldn’t, even if he wanted to). One might say that Miller wanted to preserve an image of a paradise that he worried would soon be lost. But it wasn’t a paradise: Greece, as he mentions only once, was under a military dictatorship at this time. Should he have written about that? I can’t say. Not necessarily. But I can’t help but be reminded of another book, Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, set during Pinochet’s coup, in which the artsy-fartsy folks sit around and talk about art and aesthetics while there’s a torture chamber in the basement. As a result, this 1941 literary bombshell, ostensibly about Greece, documents Miller's memories of New York inspired by a view of Athens, provides a lengthy disquisition on jazz when he's confronted by a French woman who disdains the chaos of Greece, and paints a disquieting, mad, and ominous picture of Saturn when he climbs to an observatory and views it through a telescope. He tells us his dreams and daydreams and what he wished he would have said. Everything is fair game; the seeming digressions frequent and fabulous. Narrated by four main characters, The Sea Change moves from London to New York to Athens and, finally, to the Greek island of Hydra. The bestselling author of the Cazalet Chronicles Elisabeth Jane Howard, (a brilliant writer who, for the better part, had to put her own literary ambitions on hold to play second-fiddleto that of her husband Kingsley Amis’ budding career) delivers a novel about learning to move beyond the past without giving up our memories, and how we can change and grow. It’s a pity nobody reads Miller, because it’s all there: the damaged, wine-fired poet playing with utopian blueprints, constructing fabulous cities on overscribbled sheets of paper. De Quincey nightmares that fade in the cold Athenian dawn. Dreams that know they are dreams. All too soon the Germans would arrive and the craziest (and most frustrated) architect of them all, Adolf Hitler, would salute the proud ruins.