Picture: XII the Reversal, 

Le Tarot des Alchimistes, 

Jean Beauchard

Introduction

Before we begin I’d like to express my gratitude to my partner Beliz for the effort she has put in editing this piece.

Imagine a plant whose roots are in the sky and shoots in the earth. This plant that grows at the intersection of the two infinites is the human being. Spirit and matter are often perceived as opposing concepts. This is not surprising when we see the soul as a transcendent object beyond this realm and our physical body as a temporary garment of this world. This opposition, sometimes perceived as antagonism, perhaps invites us to participate in a much deeper unity and the creation that sprouts from it. In Zorba, Kazantzakis shows us how to respond to this invitation. He says the following about the excitement and breakthrough that his time with Zorba awakened in him:

“My life is wasted, I thought. If only I could take a cloth and wipe out all I have learnt, all I have seen and heard, and go to Zorba’s school and start the great, the real alphabet! What a different road I would choose. I should keep my five senses perfectly trained, and my whole body, too, so that it would enjoy and understand. I should learn to run, to wrestle, to swim, to ride horses, to row, to drive a car, to fire a rifle. I should fill my soul with flesh. I should fill my flesh with soul. In fact, I should reconcile at last within me the two eternal antagonists…” 6, 81 **

Zorba is a great dancer, instead of trying to put his feelings into words, he lives them, and if he has to convey them, he does it through dance. Let’s get into the action with Zorba:

“‘Come on, Zorba,’ I cried, ‘teach me to dance!'” 25, 312

**From now on I will show the pages from the novel in this way, number of chapters, number of pages the source is mentioned below.

Zorba’s School

“What was the use of the Resurrection of Christ, if it was not a sign for the rekindling of youth and joy in us as well? If it could not make an old cocotte feel one-and-twenty again?” 21, 250. I would choose this sentence to summarize Kazantzakis’ Zorba, and to express the above sentence in a more philosophical language: “If the divine essence within us, which enables us to connect with truth, cannot be revitalized and animated with youth and joy, and free itself from the domination of the material world that has aged it and trapped it in its webs, what value can any religious story that is designed to cultivate this joy in us have in itself?”

Kazantzakis describes the state of dry stories devoid of the joy of living:

“… I reached up to some book-shelves above my head and took down a book which I had brought with me and of which I was fond: the poems of Mallarmé. I read slowly and at random. I closed the book, opened it again, and finally threw it down. For the first time in my life it all seemed bloodless, odourless, void of any human substance. Pale-blue, hollow words in a vacuum. Perfectly clear distilled water without any bacteria, but also without any nutritive substances. Without life.

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls. Something similar had happened to this poetry. The ardent aspirations of the heart, laden with earth and seed, had become a flawless intellectual game, a clever, aerial and intricate architecture.” 12, 145

Zorba is an extraordinary character. He is brave, courageous, loving, moral, but he is also crazy, unexpected and incomprehensible. Because he is not a prisoner of molds but a master of them. He sees them not as rules to be followed, but as a collection of tools to shape his own creation:

“The men were working frenziedly. Zorba alone could lead them on like that. With him work became wine, women and song, and the men were intoxicated. The earth came to life in his hands, the stones, coal, wood and workers adopted his rhythm, a sort of war was declared in the galleries in the white light of the acetylene lamps and Zorba was in the fore-front, fighting hand to hand. He gave name to each gallery and seam, and a face to all invisible forces, and after that it became difficult for them to escape him. ” 16, 195-6

We see that Zorba is dedicated to the act of creation. It is such a commitment that it is not an obligation for him. He does what he does out of love, but he doesn’t think about what love is. When he thinks, when he tries to build a structure, he gets confused; but to be amazed, to fall in love are tastes indispensable for him.

“Не stopped for a moment in amazement, as if he were seeing this astounding spectacle for the first time in his life. He looked round at me, and in his look I discerned faint consternation. ‘Boss, did you see that?’ he said at last. ‘On slopes, stones come to life again.’ I said nothing, but I felt a deep joy. This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything – as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

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, the water, the animals and God, without the distorting intervention of reason.“ 12, 148

Zorba breathes life into matter, the tempo of creative activity increases, light illuminates darkness; in the battle of “turning matter into spirit” (24, 299) Zorba is at the forefront. This war is essentially the story of man striving to pour God’s movement into the earth. In this story we can speak of two poles: masculine and feminine. Here the action of God the “Father” is directed towards Mary the “Mother” and the divine essence that manifests in creation is the “Son” of this union. To give a physical analogy, we could say: the heart beats, the beating action pumps, the beating distributes blood throughout the body, the body is nourished. If we say that it is God who makes the heart beat, it is the heart that is able to take this beating and turn it into life, the blood, which is matter in a more elegant form, so that God’s creation nourishes the body and this nourishment makes life visible.

In this context, the union of man and woman is perhaps the greatest sanctity for Zorba, for the union of these two poles is the planting of the seed in fertile soil, the very essence of creation. It is for these reasons that Zorba encourages his friend to be with the widow who likes him:

“I listened without saying a word and continued slowly to turn the pages of the manuscript. I whistled to conceal my emotion. But Zorba, seeing I did not speak, suddenly burst

‘This is Christmas Eve, my friend, hurry up, get to her before she goes to church. Christ will be born tonight, boss; you go and perform your miracle, too!’ I rose, irritated.

“That’s enough, Zorba, I said. Every one follows his own bent. Man is a like a tree. You’ve never quarrelled with a fig tree because it doesn’t bear cherries, have you? Well then, that’ll do! It’s nearly midnight. Let us go to the church and see Christ born ourselvers.”

Zorba pulled his thick winter cap over his head.

“All right, then!” he said unhappily. “Let’s go! But I want you to know that God would have been much more pleased if you’d gone to the widow’s tonight, like Archangel Gabriel. If God had followed the same path as you, boss, he’d never have gone to Mary’s and Christ would never have been born. If you asked me what path God follows, I’d say: the one leading to Mary’s. Mary is the widow.”” 10, 124-5

Zorba urges his friend, preoccupied with pages, books, the aerial architecture, to meet the lonely and desirous widow, but the friend is hesitant; he is not ready to participate in life as Zorba would. Just as the body can know and experience things intuitively, the mind will fail when it tries to grasp it. It cannot grasp that the rebirth of Christ will come not from the hands of the priest in the church, but from his union with the widow. She is the midwife here, not the priest.

The timidity of Zorba’s friend in being with the widow is the work of his fear. This fear is the fear that if he participates in life he will perish by touching what the mind cannot grasp. The widow is as attractive to the body as she is terrifying to the mind. Creation does not consist in material creation as we know it in its everyday form, which is not a creation but only a transformation. Creation is being in the flow, at the command of the creator of life, shaping your actions as he wishes. When the mind participates in this process, it will have to say goodbye to its fantasies rooted in matter, which is its greatest fear. Although the inability to cope with this fear angers the mind, it is at a crossroads where it will decide whether to be in the flow or not:

“‘Boss, he said, ‘this is where I count on you. Now, don’t dishonour the male species! The god-devil sends you this choice morsel. You’ve got teeth. All right, get ’em into it. Stretch out your arm and take her! What did the Creator give us hands for? To take things! So, take ’em! I’ve seen loads of women in my time. But that damned widow makes the steeples rock!’

I don’t want any trouble!’ I replied angrily.I was irritated because in my heart of hearts I also  had desired that all-powerful body which had passed by me like a wild animal on heat, distilling musk.‘You don’t want any trouble!’ Zorba exclaimed in stupefaction. ‘And pray, what do you want, then?’ I did not answer.

‘Life is trouble, Zorba continued. ‘Death, no. To live – do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!’
I still said nothing. I knew Zorba was right, I knew it, but I did not dare. My life had got on the wrong track, and my contact with men had become now a mere soliloquy. I had fallen so low that, if I had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book.

‘Don’t calculate, boss, Zorba continued. ‘Leave your figures alone, smash the blasted scales, shut up your grocer’s shop, I tell you. Now’s the time you’re going to save or to lose your soul…” 8, 110

Kazantzakis describes the experience of lightness when the main narrator makes love to the widow and participates in creation, that is, when he manages to save his soul:

“I calmly chewed my food in the sun and felt a deep physical happiness as if I was floating on the cool, green waters of the sea. I did not allow my mind to take possession of this carnal joy, to press it into its own moulds, and make thoughts of it. I let my whole body rejoice from head to foot, like an animal. Now and then, nevertheless, in ecstasy, I gazed about me and within me, at the miracle of this life: What is happening? I said to myself. How did it come about that the world is so perfectly adapted to our feet and hands and bellies? And once again I closed my eyes and was silent” 21, 257

Pythagorean Y and Zorba

Inspired by Kazantzakis’ novel Zorba, we did a little reflection on what it means to create and be in flow. In this section, we will relate what we have e to the Pythagorean Y. This symbol is expressed by the letter “Y”, upsilon, from the Ancient Greek alphabet. Even at first glance, it can be seen that the symbol speaks of a fork in the road with its two branching arms. This crossroads is the choice of which path we take in life, according to some, between vice or virtue. We can see this choice as whether or not to participate in the divine flow and, as Zorba puts it, “the time to save your soul or bury it”.

Geoffroy Tory has illustrated this symbol with this theme in mind:

Now, based on Zorba’s wisdom, we will also paint a “Y” with words. Imagine the Upsilon as a flower sprouting from the soil. Let this be the spiritual birth that expresses the beginning, the root of the path from seed to adulthood. Let the soil be the life experiences, memories, emotions, feelings, sensations, tastes, knowledge accumulated until now.

Just as Kazantzakis enters Zorba’s school by forgetting, we will sacrifice the false self we have built up to this day with these resources and use the roots to re-cultivate ourselves by eliminating unneeded the components and selecting the needed ones. Listen to Zorba:

” ‘It’s difficult, boss, very difficult. You need a touch of folly to do that; folly, d’you see? You have to risk everything! But you’ve got such a strong head, it’ll always get the better of you. A man’s head is like a grocer; it keeps accounts: I’ve paid so much and earned so much and that means a profit of this much or a loss of that much! The head’s a careful little shopkeeper; it never risks all it has, always keeps something in reserve. It never breaks the string. Ah no! It hangs on tight to it, the bastard! If the string slips out of its grasp, the head, poor devil, is lost, finished! But if a man doesn’t break the string, tell me, what flavour is left in life? The flavour of camomile, weak camomile tea! Nothing like rum – that makes you see life inside out!’ ” 26, 323-4

The madness here, as we mentioned above, is, like Zorba, to “see the world from the first sight” and to be open to life “without the form-changing intervention of reason”. If reason is to be of any use, it will not do so at this stage, but as a tool after it is liberated from the influence of the false self, which sprouts from conditioned notion of truth, forced by the outer world. It would be better to approach what reason says with a little skepticism at this stage, to observe and watch without judgment in order to see how much it is affected by the false self.

Nevertheless, the mind needs a hypothesis to cling to, a carrot in the regular sense of the word, in order to facilitate action. When Kazantzakis met one of the village elders on the way to church, the old man said:

“I never had any education, but one day at church I heard something Christ had said. It stuck in my head and I never forget it: “Sell,” he said, “everything you possess to obtain the Great Pearl”. And what is that Great Pearl? The salvation of your soul. You are well on the way to getting the Great Pearl, sir.’

The Great Pearl! How many times it had gleamed in the darkness of my mind like a huge tear!” 15, 185

Again, to illustrate the mobilizing power of these stories and images, Kazantzakis says:

“If the scriptures had said: ‘Today, light is born, man’s heart would not have leapt. The idea would not have become a legend and would not have conquered the world. They would merely have described a normal physical phenomenon and would not have fired our imagination – I mean our soul. But the light which is born in the dead of winter has become a child and the child has become God, and for twenty centuries our soul has suckled it…” 10, 125-6

When this image falls on the soil of the soul, it gives life to a seed of light hidden long ago and inspires it to action. The madness of seeing the world for the first time becomes an alchemical joy for the soul that remembers itself under the influence of this vital water bestowed by the image:

“I rose at dawn and gazed at the earth and the sea from the doorway of our hut. It seemed to me that the world had been transformed overnight. Opposite me on the sand, a small clump of thorny bushes, which had been a miserable dull colour the day before, was now covered with tiny white blossoms. In the air hung a sweet, haunting perfume of lemon and orange trees in flower. I walked out a few steps. I could never see too much of this ever-recurring miracle.

Suddenly I heard a happy cry behind me. Zorba had risen and rushed to the door, half-naked. He, too, was thrilled by this sight of spring.

‘What is that?’ he asked stupefied. ‘That miracle over there, boss, that moving blue, what do they call it? Sea? Sea?

And what’s that wearing a flowered green apron? Earth?

Who was the artist who did it? It’s the first time I’ve seen that, boss, I swear!’

His eyes were brimming over.

‘Zorba!’ I cried. ‘Have you gone off your head?’

What are you laughing at? Don’t you see? There’s magic behind all that, boss!’

He rushed outside, began dancing and rolling in the grass like a foal in spring.

The sun appeared and I held out my palms to the warmth.

Rising sap … the swelling breast… and the soul also blossoming like a tree; you could feel that body and soul were kneaded from the same material.

Zorba had stood up again, his hair full of dew and earth.

‘Quick, boss!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll dress and make ourselves smart! Today we are to be blessed…” 20, 245-6

Our soul, as it begins to awaken, feels a sense of urgency to make sense. This feeling is not about fitting the world into the boundaries and patterns set by the false self. It is a reflection of the awakening soul’s desire to mature. It is on the threshold of an experience that transcends itself under the impact of the most difficult, intense questions:

” When I had finished reading Zorba’s letter I was for a while in two minds – no, three. I did not know whether to be angry, or laugh, or just admire this primitive man who simply cracked life’s shell – logic, morality, honesty – and went straight to its very substance. All the little virtues which are so useful are lacking in him. All he has is an uncomfortable, dangerous virtue which is hard to satisfy and which urges him continually and irresistibly towards the utmost limits, towards the abyss.

When he writes, this ignorant workman breaks his pens in his impetuosity. Like the first men to cast off their monkey-skins, or like the great philosophers, he is dominated by the basic problems of mankind. He lives them as if they were immediate and urgent necessities.” 13, 165

In the midst of this urgency we come to the crossroads of Upsilon. Will our soul now internalize the Great Pearl planted through passive imagination that first set it in motion here and endure the transformation it will undergo? Or will it shrink from the difficulties of the road ahead, clinging to this nurturing, life-giving mother who moved it to give birth to itself? Will the deep questions that soul has absorbed with urgency give him the courage and resilience to endure what is coming to her heart, or will they be a veil against it?

“As a child, then, I had almost fallen into the well. When grown up, I nearly fell into the word ‘eternity’, and into quite a number of other words too – ‘love’, ‘hope’, ‘country’, ‘God’. As each word was conquered and left behind, I had the feeling that I had escaped a danger and made some progress. But no, I was only changing words and calling it deliverance. And there I had been, for the last two years, hanging over the edge of the word ‘Buddha’.” 15, 190

Right: Path of Virtue

Let us remember this sentence again: “What was the use of the Resurrection of Christ, if it was not a sign for the rekindling of youth and joy in us as well? If it could not make an old cocotte feel one-and-twenty again?” Here it is necessary to ask: who is this old cocotte ? Throughout the novel, Zorba’s most consistent lover is Madame Hortense. Madame Hortense is a French singer and dancer who speaks a little Greek, owns a hotel in Crete and is now quite old. In her time she had been the lover and mistress of many high-ranking men.

This woman, who is Aphrodite at heart, is so tied to material existence that she is terrified when this bond is unraveling:

“Everything was dark and disturbing about her; blue vapours were rising from the ground and changing shape. They formed sneering mouths, claw-like feet, black wings. She dug her nails into her pillow, which was stained with tears, saliva and sweat, and she cried out.

‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to!’” 23, 277

Madame Hortense like the body enables her to experience sensations in extremes: her intensity in making love to Zorba parallels her terror in the deathbed.  In everyday life, we think of the soul and the body, and we separate the the one from the other. However, Kazantzakis allgeorically representing the body as Madame Hortense, says the body is a soul too. The experience of lightness that comes after making love with the widow depicts the soul that is the body:

“All 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.” 21, 256

If we characterize the body’s tolerance of all these sensations in terms of its openness to them as pain, we can say that the body matures through pain. The maturity comes by feeling pain without suppressing it with any explanation or thought (see also Simone Weil – Zeus and Prometheus):

“That is what a real man is like, I thought, envying Zorba’s sorrow. A man with warm blood and solid bones, who lets real tears run down his cheeks when he is suffering; and when he is happy he does not spoil the freshness of his joy by running it through the fine sieve of metaphysics.” 22, 269

The body, which is a burdened soul, awakens through pain. As difficult as this awakening is to bear and as futile as we struggle and try in vain to get out of it, we reach maturity through pain. More we mature, more we become able to connect with our inner senses and intuition. In this way we can touch those invisible threads that bind us all together and open the door to perceptions beyond the physical. Kazantzakis can feel from Crete that his friend is in danger as he struggles to defend his Greek brothers in the Caucasus:

“I rushed headlong down the mountainside track, trying to deaden my sorrow by fatigue. My brain struggled in vain to piece together those mysterious messages which sometimes manage to pierce the body and reach the soul. In the depths of my being, a strange certainty, deeper than reason, entirely animal in quality, filled me with terror. The same certainty which some beasts – sheep and rats – feel before an earthquake. Awakening in me was the soul of the first men on earth, such as it was before it became totally detached from the universe, when it still felt the truth directly, without the distorting influence of reason.” 25, 319-20

The capacity to endure and its realization comes from the masculine force of the soul. This force is so attracted to its pole, the female, perhaps to virtue itself, that it can endure anything, no matter how difficult it is for him. Of course, this desire will find some objects in the material world and try to define itself with them. The story of Zorba’s father tells the place of masculinity in this journey of emancipation very well. His father, according to Zorba, does not speak but “neighs”. He cannot bear to be dominated and enslaved by a desire above his own heart. This hardened desire is tobacco for him in this story. He is so driven by it that he frees himself from this defect by chewing his tobacco pouch:

“‘My father was a real Palikari. Don’t look at me, I’m only a breath of air beside him. I don’t come up to his ankles. He was one of those ancient Greeks they always talk about. When he shook your hand he nearly crushed your bones to pulp. I can talk now and then, but my father roared, neighed and sang.

There very rarely came a human word out of his mouth.

Well, he had all the vices, but he’d slash them, as you would with a sword. For instance, he smoked like a chimney.

One morning he got up and went into the fields to plough.

He arrived, leaned on the hedge, pushed his hand into his belt for his tobacco-pouch to roll a cigarette before he began work, took out his pouch and found it was empty. He’d forgotten to fill it before leaving the house.

‘He foamed with rage, let out a roar, and then bounded away towards the village. His passion for smoking completely unbalanced his reason, you see. But suddenly – I’ve always said I think man’s a mystery – he stopped, filled with shame, pulled out his pouch and tore it to shreds with his teeth, then stamped it in the ground and spat on it. “Filth! Filth!” he bellowed. “Dirty slut!”

‘And from that hour, until the end of his days, he never put another cigarette between his lips.

‘That’s the way real men behave, boss. Good night!‘” 26, 325

The man who works on his own heart with this determination and sincerity is ready to give up now dried-up dreams that initially set him in motion:

“I must free myself of all these phantoms, I thought, Buddhas, Gods, Motherlands, Ideas…Woe to him who cannot free himself from Buddhas, Gods, Motherlands and Ideas.” 16, 198

With this openness, he is ready to experience the blessing that will come from the divine, to unite the two worlds, to become a “god” in the material world. Kazantzakis describes the arrival of this inspiration and blessing with the arrival of the cranes. Through the sound of the cranes in the order and functioning of the entire universe, man can sense his own virtue, feel his uniqueness in its entirety and join the flow:

“As I walked I suddenly heard loud trumpetings in the air. I raised my eyes and saw a marvellous spectacle which had always moved me deeply ever since my childhood: cranes deploying across the sky in battle order, returning from wintering in a warmer country, and, as legend has it, carrying swallows on their wings and in the deep hollows of their bony bodies.

The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth which are lit in turn by the sun, the passing of life – all these filled me once more with a feeling of [excitement*] . Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes’ cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.

A mind hearing this pitiless warning – a warning which, at the same time, is so compassionate – would decide to conquer its weakness and meanness, its laziness and vain hopes and cling with all its power to every second which flies away for ever.” 15, 183

Kazantzakis thus describes the state of the one who is in flow:

“This man with his infallible instinct and his primitive eagle-like look had taken confident short-cuts and, without even losing his breath, had reached the peak of effort and had even gone further.” 25, 315

* excitement: I choose to follow the meaning from the Turkish translation, the English translation says “oppression”.

Left: thorns of Defects

As it brings with it them maturing pain, the urgency that opens the soul to experience becomes difficult to tolerate. Urgency here can turn into rashness and give one a gnawing anxiety to find an outcome. The distress experienced in this emotion prevents the soul from feeling the pain that would bring transformation. Contrary to human expectation, nature takes its time in what it does. It gives everything the necessary attention and time to mature. In trying to find a result, all efforts can be in vain:

“I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as the butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them.

Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath. In vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.

That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realise today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.” 10, 132

Insisting on rashness leads one to impose one’s view on nature, to crystallize one’s views and beliefs. The image of the Great Pearl that was supposed to motivate the soul has now taken him captive. The “incomprehensible and airy” religions that Zorba mentions above, religions that have “lost their creative luster” are born out of this captivity. Kazantzakis calls this captivity the Great Certainty:

“There is only one formidable enemy, mortally feared and hated: the Great Certainty. Now, this Great Certainty had penetrated the outer walls of my existence and was ready to pounce upon my soul.

… All these messages, I thought, are born of our own inner anxiety, and in our sleep assume the brilliant garb of a symbol. But we ourselves are the ones who create them…” 25, 320

The one who is trapped by the Great Certainty wants to take the meaning he cannot experience by force from those around him. That is why, instead of using abstract concepts such as “homeland” and “god” as transformers for self-realization, the trapped person focuses on separating himself from others, harboring hostility towards them, and thus becomes blinded over a fictitious victory to be achieved against them. Zorba has been down this road too. While fleeing from the enemy during the war, a widow shelters him in a Bulgarian village, but the bloodthirsty monster, the Great Certainty, ends up claiming her life:

“… I said to myself, “there’s a woman for you; that’s what humanity means! What is she? Bulgar? Greek? Papuan? That’s the last thing that matters! She’s human, and a human being with a mouth, and breasts, and she can love. Aren’t you ashamed of killing? Bah! Swine! warmth. But did that mad bitch, my country, leave me in peace for that, do you think? I disappeared next morning in the clothes the Bulgar woman gave me. She was a widow.

She took her late husband’s clothes out of a chest, gave them to me, and she hugged my knees and begged me to come back to her.

‘Yes, yes, I did go back … the following night. I was a patriot then, of course – a wild beast; I went back with a can of paraffin and set fire to the village. She must have been burnt along with the others, poor wretch. Her name was Ludmilla.’

Zorba sighed. He lit a cigarette, took one or two puffs and then threw it away.

My country, you say?.. You believe all the rubbish your books tell you …? Well, I’m the one you should believe. So long as there are countries, man will stay like an animal, a ferocious animal… But I am delivered from all that, God be praised! It’s finished for me! What about you?’ I didn’t answer. 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. All the problems I was trying to solve point by point in my solitude and glued to my chair, this man had solved up in the pure air of the mountains with his sword.

I closed my eyes, inconsolable.

‘Are you asleep, boss?’ said Zorba, vexed. ‘Here I am, like a fool, talking to you!’

He lay down grumbling, and very soon I heard him snoring.

I was not able to sleep all night. A nightingale we heard for the first time that night filled our solitude with an unbearable sadness and suddenly I felt the tears on my cheeks.” 20, 244-5

Conclusion

Kazantzakis asks:

“And when the body dissolves, does anything at all remain of what we have called the soul? Or does nothing remain, and does our unquenchable desire for immortality spring, not from the fact that we are immortal, but from the fact that during the short span of our life we are in the service of something immortal?” 24, 292-3

Everyone can answer this question for themselves, but whatever answer we give, we can feel something in common with Zorba over the meaning he gives to life:

“What is its aim and in what way can we help to attain it during our ephemeral lives? The aim of man and matter is to create joy, according to Zorba – others would say ‘to create spirit…” 24, 292

God’s laughter and joy finds expression in this material world through the human soul (see Ficino). On that note, I leave the floor to another character in the novel, the half-mad Zaharias:

“… I tell jokes and cut capers about the place and make the monks laugh. They all say I’m possessed by the devil and insult me. But I say to myself: “It can’t be true; God must like fun and laughter. “Come inside, my little buffoon, come inside,” he’ll say to me one day, I know. “Come and make me laugh!’ That’s the way I’ll get into Paradise, as a buffoon!’” 17, 207

May all our work fill us with the joy of living on the path of virtue

Resim: XXI The World,
Le Tarot des Alchimistes, Jean Beauchard

Zorba the Greek, 

directed by Michael Cacoyannis, 

music by Mikis Theodorakis, 

and Zorba as Anthony Quinn

For those interested I also suggest the movie “Que la lumiere soit” by Arthur Joffé about God’s joy and laughter and how the soul enacts it on this world. It’s a story that is essentially very similar to Zorba the Greek:

Sources