Europe Without Baedeker by Edmund Wilson

Author:Edmund Wilson [Wilson, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

GREEK DIARY: NOTES ON LIBERATED ATHENS

IT IS A PIQUANT AND NOVEL SENSATION to travel from Naples to Athens in an army transport plane. Our airports and planes create a world of their own, an extension of the American system, that has been superimposed on Europe and makes a dissonant contrast with it. Over the blue Ionian Sea, you are handed a neat cardboard box, which contains, carefully wrapped in wax-paper, sandwiches of three kinds, each with a small printed slip that tells what the filling is—beef-spread, melted cheese or marmalade and peanut butter—so that you will know in what order to eat them; a hardboiled egg, with pepper and salt done up picnic-fashion in paper; a cookie; a small container of cut-up peaches and pears, with a miniature pasteboard spoon; a bag of fruit drops of assorted flavors; and a pasteboard cup for water.

When you look down and see the first Greek islands, you are surprised by the difference from Italy, whose dense plantings of parched yellow fields you have so short a time before left behind. Here is a paler, purer, soberer country, which seems both wild and old and quite distinct from anything farther west. The sea is absolutely smooth, sometimes violet, sometimes blue, with a softness of water-color, glistening in patches with a fine grain of silver; and the islands of all sizes in bulbous or oblong shapes—blobs and round-bottomed bottles and the contours of plump roast fowl—seem not to rise out of the water but to be plaqued on it like cuff-links on cuffs or to lie scattered like the fragments of a picture-puzzle on a table with a blue cloth cover. These islands are a dry terra-cotta—quite unlike the deep earthy clay tints to which one has been accustomed in Italy—almost the color of too well-cooked liver, and the vegetation looks like gray lichens. The marblings on the looping beaches set up a feeling of uncanny familiarity which refers itself, as one recognizes in a moment, to the patterns on the ancient Greek vases made out of this very soil. Even on the large islands and the mainland, there are visible little cultivation and few plainly cut ribbons of roads, and the country, after humanized Italy, seems grander and more mysterious. The haze of the fawn-colored foreground shades farther away into blue, where the mountains stand dim and serene. These are the “shadowy mountains” of Homer.

Swooping down upon the airport at Eleusis, you seem to be heaving among billows that do not really resemble hills, with their dry green of foliage, pale gray of stone and curious pale yellow of clay. There is a special apparent lightness of substance and absence of strong color which characterizes Greece and sets it off from other countries. As you descend into the hot airport, you have a general grateful impression of simplification and gentle austerity.

The transportation truck speeds with jolts along the Sacred Way that leads from Eleusis to the Acropolis. One is surprised and thrilled to see from the street-signs that it is still called the Hiera Hodos.

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