Zorba the Greek

“‘No [...] I don’t believe in anything or anyone; only in Zorba. Not because Zorba is better than the others; not at all, not a little bit! He’s a brute like the rest! But I believe in Zorba because he’s the only being I have in my power, the only one I know. All the rest are ghosts. I see with these eyes, I hear with these ears, I digest with these guts. All the rest are ghosts, I tell you.’” 

The narrator wants to have genuine interactions with the men he hires to work on the mine, but Zorba discourages him from growing too close to them. Zorba doesn’t believe in men, only in himself. This is why he later mentions that he fears old age and thus the breakdown of his body.

“I was fully aware of what would be destroyed. I did not know what would be built out of the ruins. No one can know that with any degree of certainty, I thought. The old world is tangible, solid, we live in it and are struggling with it every moment — it exists. The world of the future is not yet born, it is elusive, fluid, made of the light from which dreams are woven; it is a cloud buffeted by violent — love, hate, imagination, luck, God…” 

Zorba challenges the narrator about teaching abstract ideas to the villagers. Zorba believes that in teaching them about equal rights and animal cruelty, the narrator would only be demolishing their worldview. He asks what the point of that would be, if something else would replace their old belief system, but the narrator cannot answer.

“That man has not been to school, I thought, and his brains have not been perverted. He has all manner of experiences; his mind is open and his heart has grown bigger, without his losing an ounce of his primitive boldness. All the problems which we find so complicated or insoluble he cuts through as if with a sword, like Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian knot.” 

When Zorba tells the narrator that his inability to explain what his ideology offers the peasants means that it has nothing to offer them, the narrator reacts with admiration. Zorba has gathered knowledge through experience; to him, the narrator’s intellectual dilemmas are not so complicated. The narrator agrees with Zorba and does not try to educate the villagers.

“While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize — sometimes with astonishment — how happy we had been.” 

Zorba’s companionship makes the narrator happy. Though he mentions being content in the present, he eventually immortalizes the happiness he felt with Zorba by writing about their time Crete.

“’Everyone follows his own bent. Man is like a tree. You’ve never quarreled with a fig tree because it doesn’t bear cherries, have you?’” 

After Zorba encourages the narrator to sleep with the widow, the narrator says this to argue that he is a different kind of man. Cherries come up again when Zorba tells the narrator he used to have a fixation on cherries as a boy. Finding it troublesome, he gorged himself on cherries until he could no longer stand them. Thus, the text makes a connection between cherries and earthly pleasures.

“The belly is the firm foundation; bread, wine and meat are the first essentials; it is only with bread, wine and meat that one can create God.” 

It is Christmas Eve, and the narrator is a skeptic who sees God as just another idea, like nationalism or love, but he recognizes that before those ideas can exist, human beings need sustenance. The narrator goes from finding actions like eating separate from and lesser than the world of ideas to discovering that they constitute the world of ideas.

“For I realize 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.” 

As he struggles with his attraction to the widow, the narrator recalls trying to help a butterfly out of its cocoon, only to see it die as a result. The memory suggests that the narrator’s struggle isn’t about denying himself the widow, but feeling that it is not the right time to seek her out. The right time is signaled when, as he goes to see her, he feels his body moving toward her without rational thought.

“The human element is brutish, uncouth, impure — it is composed of love, the flesh, and a cry of distress. Let it be sublimated into an abstract idea and, in the crucible of the spirit, by various processes of alchemy, let it be rarefied and evaporate.” 

The narrator feels that Mallarme’s poetry, which used to affect him, now has no true substance, being divorced from the reality of human experience. The narrator hopes that writing his own manuscript will relieve this impulse to take shelter in abstraction.

“Action, dear inactive master; there is no other salvation.” 

The narrator’s friend writes this in his letter. For him, the solution to spiritual malaise is to toil in service of an idea. This echoes the narrator’s desire for experience, but the narrator does not have an idea that he would toil for. His action then has to be for itself.

“I think the only people who want to be free are human beings. Women don’t want to be free. Well, is a woman a human being?” 

Zorba writes this in his letter from Iraklio, in which he describes his affair with Lola and the incident where she wanted him to accompany her to a festival. When he told her to go alone, as a free person, she declined. Zorba later determines that women are human beings who also want freedom, but they are drawn astray by their desire for money and by their need to be desired by men. His experience with Nousa, who left him for a soldier, and his experience with Hortense, who is constantly overcome by memories of her past lovers, demonstrate the conflict he observes within women.

“‘You’re young,’ he said smiling at me; ‘don’t listen to the old. If the world did heed them, it would rush headlong to its destruction. If a widow crosses your path, get hold of her! Get married, have children, don’t hesitate! Troubles were made for young men.’” 

Uncle Anagnosti says this to the narrator after lovestruck Pavli’s suicide over the widow. Anagnosti initially reflected that Pavli did well in choosing death because now he won’t have to bear either the widow’s rejection or whatever troubles might come from her accepting his marriage proposal. But he changes his mind and instead encourages the narrator to live life to its fullest no matter what might come of it.

“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 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.” But now I feel sure — Zorba be praised — that Buddha will be the last well of all, the last word precipice, and then I shall be delivered forever. Forever? That is what we say each time.”

While the narrator had thought that he was progressing to a higher understanding by realizing there was no “God” or “country,” but another ideology, in reality, he was simply substituting one false dominant idea for another. His idea now is that of Buddha, which signifies nothingness, the void of all meaning. The narrator thinks that this is the ultimate understanding, but he remains doubtful. In the end, he is right to be skeptical, since the absence of all ideas isn’t what he discovers in Crete, but the importance of bodily experience in correspondence with spiritual experience.

“‘He lived to be a hundred and twenty, Zorba, because he had faith. He had found his God and he had no worries. But we have no God to nourish us, Zorba, so light the fire, will you, and we’ll cook those chads.’” 

After mentioning his cousin’s fasting, Zorba why they can’t stop eating. The narrator replies that in the absence of belief in an idea like “God,” physical sustenance is necessary. The narrator’s accepting attitude here contrasts with his earlier reluctance to eat, especially with others.

“‘That’s how men free themselves! Listen to me; there’s no other way except by stuffing themselves till they burst. Not by turning ascetic.’”

Zorba finds himself disgusted by the hypocrisy of the monks at the monastery. Zorba sees the cure for vices to be indulging in them until one grows sick of them, rather than denying them.

“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 flesh is soul, somewhat turgid perhaps, somewhat exhausted by its long journeys, and bowed under the burden it has inherited.” 

After spending the night with the widow, the narrator realizes that the mind and the body are not as separate as he initially thought. According to the narrator, the mind and body are different in that the body is more limited than the mind, but they are analogous. He’s able to finish his manuscript the next day, which suggests that the synthesis of mind and body not only produces pleasure, but also art.

“A few hours later the widow was at rest in my memory, calm and serene, changed into a symbol.” 

After the widow is murdered, the only way the narrator can assimilate the events is to reduce her to a “symbol” without a concrete existence outside of his mind. This is further proof of the narrator’s dependence on his intellect rather than his feelings. Unlike the narrator, Zorba falls into observable despondency over the tragedy, a reaction the narrator sees as more genuine.

“I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and despairing: Sacred Awe.”

The narrator’s time in Crete has pushed the boundaries of what he can comprehend, particularly after the deaths of the widow and Hortense. He comes to value truly understanding that the world is too vast to assimilate. In the face of the vastness of the world and human experience, the narrator finds “Sacred Awe,” that boundary between what is known and isn’t, a source of anxiety that is nonetheless a raw material he can use for his art.

“‘Every time I suffer, boss,’ he said as though to justify himself, ‘it just cracks my heart in two. But it’s all scarred and riddled with wounds already, and it sticks itself together again in thrice and the wound can’t be seen. I’m covered with healed wounds and that’s why I can stand so much.’” 

Zorba says this to the narrator after many days of silence following Hortense’s death. When Zorba calls his grief a “healed wound,” one that only makes him strong enough to bear his next grief, the narrator accuses him of forgetting Hortense. Zorba responds that he lives in the present.

“I think, Zorba — but I may be wrong — that there are three kinds of men: those who make it their aim, as they say to live their lives, eat, drink, make love, grow rich and famous; then come those who make it their aim not to live their own live but to concern themselves with the lives of all men — they feel that all men are one and they try to enlighten them, to love them as much as they can and do good to them; finally there are those who aim at living the life of the entire universe — everything, men, animals, trees, stars, we are all one substance involved in the same terrible struggle. What struggle? ...Turning matter into spirit.” 

The narrator says this after Zorba questions how a person’s demons end. The narrator describes Zorba as the first kind of man, his friend as the second, and himself as the third. “Turning matter into spirit” refers to the narrator’s aspirations to reconcile abstract thinking and genuine experience, a struggle temporarily resolved through his writing of both the Buddha manuscript in Crete and the Zorba manuscript at the novel’s end.

“When everything goes wrong, what a joy to test your soul and see if it had endurance and courage.” 

The narrator’s lignite mine and cable railway ventures were failures that cost him money and time, but the narrator finds himself happy and satisfied with his experience in Crete regardless. In living through these failures and gaining spiritual value from them, the narrator finds that he has passed the “test.”

“Happiness is doing your duty, and the harder the duty, the greater the happiness.” 

The narrator’s cherished friend writes this in a letter sent while he is fighting for the Greeks in the Caucasus, believing it’s his duty to protect his countrymen. The more the friend toils, the more he feels he has surrendered himself to his ideas of national belonging without any goal but that. The friend’s words echo the life that the narrator wants, his desire to be self-sufficient and satisfied without an attachment to a goal or outcome.

“Reason was calling my heart to order, clipping the wings of that strange palpitating bat, and clipping and clipping until it could fly no more.” 

Although the narrator has a premonition of his friend’s death shortly before he leaves Crete, he ignores it in favor of his rationality. While the narrator is worldlier now than he was at the beginning thanks to Zorba, he still maintains his intellectual disposition, which restrains his emotions. This manifests once more years later when Zorba invites him to see a green stone and the narrator overcomes his impulse to go see him.

“‘You understand, and that’s why you’ll never have any peace. If you didn’t understand, you’d be happy! What d’you lack? You’re young, you have money, health, you’re a good fellow, you lack nothing. Nothing, by thunder! Except just one thing— folly!’” 

Zorba says this to the narrator, judging that he is still too bookish, too given to abstract thinking, which is why he suffers and will continue to suffer. According to Zorba, what the narrator needs is “folly,” more impulsiveness. The narrator agrees with Zorba, remembering that he was more given to follow his impulses as a child, but he lost that spontaneity. His trip to Crete taps into that spontaneity. While the narrator is different now, in Zorba’s eyes he is still too limited by rationality.