"the laws of one's own heart"
sharing zorba the greek with a friend
I originally intended to write just one blog post on Nikos Kazantzakis, but ended up biting off more than I could chew with this one. Part II will continue the chronology of his writing career with The Last Temptation of Christ, which I read for the first time earlier this month and was published nine years after Zorba the Greek. The next post will likely dive more into socialism and institutions through the character lens of Jesus. I say “likely” here because it’s very possible that I end up abandoning this focus in favor of something different once I actually start writing, in the same way that this post ended up. Enjoy!
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I read Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis for the first time eight years ago. Still in high school, I had picked it up for ten cents at Ithaca’s Friends of the Library book sale, and I started it with no preconceived notions of what it might be. For the two months it took me to navigate my way through the novel, I was transported to interwar Crete and buffeted by some of the most raw, vigorous, poignant prose I had ever consumed in my life. I reread the novel last year, and gave a version with some underlines and annotations to a close friend, who added her own. She returned this shared copy just days ago, enriched by the observations and shared analysis that we both contributed to the worn paperback, and I took immense pleasure in revisiting my notes and delighting in hers. In a certain romantic sense, the exercise became a personal manifestation of part of what makes the book itself so wonderful: how friendship intrinsically transforms an individual pursuit, intellectual or otherwise, into a reciprocal and relational process, one that grounds us all in our shared humanity.
Zorba the Greek follows a semi-autobiographical, first-person narrator’s relationship with Alexis Zorba, a powerful, larger-than-life man who is inclined to passionate soliloquies on human nature — when he is so overtaken by emotion that he cannot speak, he dances or plays the santuri, a Greek zither-like instrument. The narrator, on the other hand, is a scholar of philosophy with an unfinished manuscript on Buddha, which torments him. To our timid, bookish narrator, Zorba represents what makes a man a man: “I had never seen such a friendly accord between a man and the universe.”1 Later, he sighs: “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.” Although the narrator emerges into a sense of freedom with each sentence of his manuscript he completes, which he describes as an “exorcism of Buddha” and of the Void that Buddha represents, he also finds freedom in Zorba’s worldview, so opposite from his own.
At the beginning of the novel, the narrator embarks upon a coal mining venture, the ostensible justification for spending time in Crete in the first place, which Zorba joins on a whim, having previously worked as a foreman in a mine.2 The narrator idealizes his potential relationship with his employees, Zorba included, inventing “romantic plans” to create a shared community, to transform leftist scholarship into praxis. This angers Zorba, who thinks of man as a “brute” and warns the narrator, “Keep your distance, boss! Don’t make men too bold… They’ll steal your bread and let you die of hunger.” This conflict foments an internal struggle for the narrator, who understands Zorba’s perspective but whose heart wants to believe in human goodness and “leap out and escape from the brute.”
Zorba continues: “I don’t believe in anything or anyone; only in Zorba… When I die, everything’ll die. The whole Zorbatic world will go to the bottom!”3 The narrator sarcastically dismisses this solipsistic take as egoism, although he silently acknowledges that it confirms his own fears about himself, that he may never understand himself and his relationship with his fellow man in the same way that Zorba does. Naturally, the mining venture fades into the background even as it forms the backbone for the book’s plot, with the men’s companionship taking center stage.
To me, Zorba seems to embody the übermensch, the philosophical concept associated with the death of God and the replacement of religious (specifically Christian) values with grounded, humanistic ideals in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.4 Zorba’s indomitable will and surety in his ideals, combined with both a confident dismissal of God and a firm commitment to embracing worldly desires and experiences, appears to approach this hypothetical figure. To the narrator, who is plagued by the same insecurity about man’s relationship with religion and morality that tormented Kazantzakis himself throughout his life (more on that in a bit), Zorba offers an alternative. In a paroxysmal speech near the novel’s end, Zorba exclaims: “God enjoys himself, kills, commits injustice, makes love, works, likes impossible things, just the same as I do… God and the devil are one and the same thing!” In other words, man the brute “eats and drinks and makes love and is frightened,” but importantly, man is also God, the devil, Zorba.
Soon after this episode, the narrator begins to understand, in his own way, after sleeping with a widow of whom he was enamored since first arriving in Crete:
“All of the joy of the previous night flowed back from the innermost depths of my being, spread out into fresh courses and abundantly watered the earth of which I was made. As I lay, with my eyes closed, I seemed to hear my being bursting its shell and growing larger. That night, for the first time, I felt clearly that the soul is flesh as well, perhaps more volatile, more diaphanous, perhaps freer, but flesh all the same. And the flesh is soul, somewhat turgid perhaps, somewhat exhausted by its long journeys, and bowed under the burden it has inherited.”
For the narrator, reconciling the soul and the flesh is essential to addressing his fundamental questions about humanity. He had thus far been consumed by dualistic desires to both “escape from Buddha, rid [himself] by words of all [his] metaphysical cares” and to “make direct and firm contact with men,” as articulated immediately following his first argument with Zorba quoted above. By personally giving into the temptation of the flesh, however, the narrator rejected and was freed from the “eternal, vain, stupid questions: why? what for?”5 Furthermore, he made a conscious effort to “not allow [his] mind to take possession of this carnal joy,” allowing himself to feel, to let his “body rejoice from head to foot.”6
Instead of seeking to separate his soul from the earthly cares and desires of the body through his internal Buddhist dialogue, the narrator finds peace in embracing those concerns that belong to the heart, the bridge between the body and the soul. After returning from the widow’s house the next day, and immediately after laying down on the beach and letting the carnal joy course through his veins, he finds that he had finished his manuscript, with Buddha dissolving “the five elements he was made of.” Upon this realization, the narrator “ordered the Buddha within [him] to dissolve” and tied up the finished manuscript as if burying a mortal enemy.
With Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis doesn’t seek to defy God — at least, he wouldn’t proclaim that God is dead, as Nietzsche did in the late 19th century. Although I may be in over my head with a discussion of Nietzsche, I couldn’t help but return to the übermensch, which implies a shift from the other-worldliness of Christianity to the morality of the here and now. The narrator, and perhaps Kazantzakis himself, does not necessarily perceive these as opposing forces — Zorba, for his part, sees them all as one and the same. Near the end of the novel, the narrator questions his prevailing assumptions, without truly reaching a conclusion:
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?
Whether these external laws are handed down by God or innate human nature is not essential to this realization that joy is found in struggling, striving toward a higher ideal. This concept is articulated in a letter from the narrator’s long-lost friend Stavridaki, who from my standpoint lies in the middle of a philosophical spectrum with Zorba on one end and the narrator on the other: “If to struggle with zeal and obstinacy is to be happy, then I am happy.”7 Soon after the narrator reaches the epiphany quoted above, a key element of the mining venture ends in catastrophic failure, but the two men are unaffected; they roast a sheep, drink wine, and the narrator insists that Zorba teach him to dance — in calamity, the narrator had discovered indescribable happiness, and the two men “[fall] asleep in each other’s arms.”
There are several reasons why this book resonates with me so deeply, principal among which is the cathartic intensity of the writing on every page, whether it concerns the narrator’s innermost fears or the beauty of the Cretan coastline. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering my place in the world, though, since I quit my job and plan on moving abroad to pursue something totally different. Looming just out of the corner of my eye, a blurry shadow that is on some days harsher and more corporeal than on others, is this pressure to develop a coherent worldview — to somehow codify the laws of my own heart — with answers to the questions that nowadays define our society. I also sympathize with and relate to (to a lesser degree, of course) the narrator’s idealistic goal of abandoning his pen in favor of directly living out the abstract theory about which he has written for years, despite working maniacally on his Buddhist manuscript to conquer his own demons, to capture and crucify them on the parchment, an intensely personal pursuit that evades his efforts to dodge the existential questions altogether.
Kazantzakis himself struggled fiercely with these questions, with his personal journey taking him from a monastery on Mount Athos to the early Soviet Union, where he adopted and later rejected Bolshevik communism. Early in his career, he wrote his J.D. thesis on Nietzsche and translated many of Nietzsche’s works into modern Greek. He later abandoned Nietzsche for the Buddha, according to his translator P.A. Bien, which I see mirrored in the intellectual journey of Zorba the Greek’s narrator. Kazantzakis ended up traveling to dozens of countries, where he was exposed to myriad perspectives and philosophies that undoubtedly influenced his personal worldview, while laboring over his personal project, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, in addition to travel writing and translations.8 As the comparative literature scholar Minas Savvas described in “Kazantzakis and Marxism” (1971), he flirted with and rejected the above figures and philosophies to varying degrees, discarding and assimilating different precepts into a “Weltanschauung that he could call his own.”
This practice does not make Kazantzakis a dilettante, flip-flopping among issues and worldviews without having a core identity — nor the narrator, from my perspective. Throughout the book it is clear that Zorba has a profound impact on how the narrator sees the world, while the same cannot necessarily be said for the reciprocal relationship. Even so, after the men separate soon after the mining venture fails and the narrator feels pulled in an independent direction, Zorba writes to him at several different points but the narrator does not go to see him; “time passed, sweetly poisoned by memories.”9 Clearly, the narrator’s companionship had also deeply affected Zorba, but as a sexagenarian who had seemingly attained vertiginous spiritual heights while managing to keep his feet firmly on the ground, Zorba was naturally less impressionable. Besides, the narrator did not abandon his socialist ideals or his intellectual pursuits, even though Zorba ridiculed him as a “pen-pusher.” The parallels between Kazantzakis and his narrator are made even more clear by the fact that the storyline itself is inspired by true events. Kazantzakis met former mine worker George Zorbas while at the monastery in Mount Athos in 1915; the two developed a close friendship and later worked as miners together in southern Greece before parting ways.
As I finish typing this blog post, sitting beside my best friend as she builds her own project, I can’t help but feel overcome with gratitude for my friends and family, those who enrich my own perspective and are open to being enriched by mine if I have anything of worth to offer. Before writing down these thoughts on Zorba the Greek, I did not necessarily intend for my focus to be on companionship, in the same way that upon my first read of the novel, I recall thinking more about how the individual philosophies and perspectives of each character were more or less relatable to me, or how the author’s description of a summer day could make me, drenched in sweat, want nothing more than to run to the beach and float in the Mediterranean, as if I were in Greece, rather than feel the relationship between Zorba and the narrator in the context of my own friendships.10
My shared reading with the friend to whom I lent Zorba the Greek unlocked a deeper empathy that I plan on sharing with other friends in the future. Many of the quotes included above come from one of her annotations — or one of mine that she added to, or a nondescript underline that could have been either of us — creating a shared understanding greater than the mere sum of its parts. As I confront the elusive, ominous shadow I mentioned earlier, I shouldn’t forget that I have and will continue to meet friends who will share with me worlds of knowledge, and that no personal journey is meant to be undertaken truly alone, especially when it concerns enacting the laws of the soul and the heart into a better world.
The full quote, which I think is worth including, reads as follows: “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.”
Of the unexplained phenomena at the beginning of the novel, principal among them is how the narrator came to take charge of a lignite mine in the first place — to be honest, I missed this on my first reading, but in hindsight it exemplifies the narrator’s central struggle: “I sought a pretext for abandoning my papers and flinging myself into a life of action… I had rented on the coast of Crete, facing Libya, a disused lignite mine, and I was going now to live with simple men, workmen and peasants, far from the face of bookworms!”
At the risk of filling this blog post with nothing but quotes from this book, I feel that I would be remiss to not share one of the narrator’s most elegant descriptions of what defines this Zorbatic world, both intensely primal and superhuman: “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, water, the animals and God, without the distorting intervention of reason.” Makes you want to read the rest of the book, no?
Disclaimer: I am not a philosophy expert, so I did my best. If you think I missed the mark, let me know.
More on the temptation of the flesh in Part II, feat. Jesus and Mary Magdalene!
As Zorba casually mentions near the beginning of the novel, in one of my favorite lines of dialogue, “The body’s got a soul too, have pity on it.” He says this in response to the narrator stating that he isn’t hungry when they arrive at the Cretan village in the afternoon, even though they hadn’t eaten since the morning.
Stavridaki is introduced at the beginning of the novel as the narrator reminisces on their last in-person conversation, in which he affectionately called the narrator “bookworm,” which in turn was the primary reason motivating the narrator to set sail for Crete and solidify his relations with fellow men. Stavridaki himself journeyed to the Caucasus to liberate the persecuted Greek minority populations there. He and Zorba each serve as foils for the narrator in distinct ways. While the narrator’s companionship with Zorba is a constant force on every page, the narrator experiences his friendship with Stavridaki through intermittent letters and flashbacks.
According to Bien, Kazantzakis worked on The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel from 1924 to 1938, following the conventions of Homer’s Odyssey — while Kazantzakis viewed it as the synthesis of his lived experience and wisdom, it received mixed criticism. Most of Kazantzakis’s most revered work was written in the last fifteen years of his life, including Zorba the Greek (1946) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1955).
Throughout the novel, Zorba’s various relationships with women, past and present, are central to many of his diatribes — the novel’s treatment of women could fill an entirely new essay. Humorously, in two sequential letters to the narrator, Zorba signs off as “A. Zorbescu” and “A. Zorbić” to indicate his marriages across different countries during his travels. The narrator does not visit Zorba for pragmatic reasons, not for lack of desire to see him, and later has a premonition of his death before receiving a letter from his second wife confirming that his fears were true.
I am currently reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, so please forgive my inspired and definitely-not-contrived attempt at a stream-of-consciousness sentence in her style.