This past weekend we travelled to Rion, a seaside town near Patras where our friend G. lives with her family. It was a much needed break from our life in Athens. After lunch on Sunday I sat outside in their new backyard, which comes complete with a small and deliciously refreshing orchard, for the few brief moments of afternoon sunshine on an otherwise dark and rainy day. The lemon trees were resplendent in the sunlight that seemed to bounce off the festive yellow skin of their fruit. I was reminded of my time in London when I had had an epiphany regarding the citrus tree: I realized one day that I had actually missed the merry sight of them, their fragrant mark upon my routes around my native city of Athens-
And as that precious midday light blazed on, my mind eventually turned to Lawrence Durrell and his magnificent description of Greek light in his Greek Islands. He writes: “[…] in the depths of the light there is blackness, but it is a blackness which throbs with violet – a magnetic unwearying ultra-violet. This confers a sort of brilliant skin of white light on material objects, linking near and far, and bathing simple objects in a sort of celestial glow-worm hue. It is the naked eyeball of God, so to speak, and it blinds one.” What a relief it is these days to go back to those poets and writers who fell in love once with Greece, Durrell, and Miller – who loved the country for her present, however shabby and inglorious this must have seemed compared to her classical past.
I also got to thinking of Byron and his prophetic image of Greece as a corpse her modern champions attempted to bring back to life.
She was one, I thought to myself, and is now perhaps the ultimate cadavre exquis!
NM
oh! the little things 