Report to Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis

Author:Nikos Kazantzakis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

22

GRETE

I HAD GROWN weary. I was young, after all, and youth’s insatiability is burdensome. It will not condescend to acknowledge man’s limits; it seeks much but is capable of little. Having struggled to attain these limits and grown weary of the struggle, I returned to the land of my fathers. I wanted to confront our mountains, see our aged standard-bearers with their tilted fezzes and broad laughter, and hear once more of wars and liberty. I wanted to tread my native soil in order to gain strength.

“Where are you coming from?” my father asked me.

“From far, far away,” I replied, not breathing a word about my adventure of nearly taking vows at Sinai.

It was the second time an attempt of mine to attain sainthood had miscarried. The first time, you remember, was in my childhood when I went down to the harbor, ran to a captain who was preparing to weigh anchor, and begged him to take me to Mount Athos so that I could become a monk. The captain split his sides with laughter. “Home, home!” he shouted. Clapping his hands as though I were a pullet, he shooed me away. Now it had happened again. “Return to the world,” Father Joachim had cried. “In this day and age the world is the true monastery; that is where you will become a saint.”

It was to gather momentum that I returned to my native soil. Leaving Kastro, I walked out to the villages, where I ate and drank with shepherds and plowmen. I felt ashamed, seeing how the lazy, fraudulent life of the monastery was so strongly opposed by the whole land of Crete, this land which is incessantly battling, if not with floods and droughts, then with poverty, disease, or the Turk. And here I was trying to go against its will and betray it by becoming a monk! Father Joachim was right. The world is our monastery, the true monk he who lives with men and works with God here, in contact with the soil. God does not sit on a throne above the clouds. He wrestles here on earth, along with us. Solitude is no longer the road for the man who strives, and true prayer, prayer which steers a course straight for the Lord’s house and enters, is noble action. This, today, is how the true warrior prays.

A Cretan once said to me, “When you appear before the heavenly gates and they fail to open, do not take hold of the knocker to knock. Unhitch the musket from your shoulder and fire.”

“Do you actually believe God will be frightened into opening the gates?”

“No, lad, He won’t be frightened. But He’ll open them because He’ll realize you are returning from battle.”

Never did I hear from an educated man words so profound as those I heard from peasants, especially from oldsters who had completed the struggle. Their passions had subsided within them; they stood now before death’s threshold, tenderly casting a final, tranquil glance behind them.

One afternoon I encountered an old man on a mountain slope.

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