Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh FermorMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
One of the pleasures of the annual Christmas/New Year break is the leisurely reading of designated "vacation reads." These are books meant to be read S-L-O-W-L-Y, each musical sentence savored over a sip of coffee rolled unhurriedly around the tongue (although this book might be better off paired with retsina or ouzo, hehe). There's no pressing plot to turn pages excitedly for, no stressful life deadline threatening to cut off the sheer hedonism of a full morning or afternoon immersed in Greek splendor.
If ROUMELI (1966), which I read up in the mountains a week ago, was about the Northern Greeks and the mental/emotional divide between the Byzantine and ancient Greek heritage, then MANI (1958) is about the South, and the legacy of ancient Sparta.
Both are widely considered to be among the best travel books of all time. However, to this reader, MANI most especially is less a travelogue than a literary painting, less of a chronicle and more of an extended reflection on History and Time. It takes very little to trigger Paddy Fermor, as the sight of a rock or the face of a shepherd sets him off pages and pages of romantic flights of fancy that are deeply rooted in the sociolinguistic patterns of history.
"Countries are only great if they can produce wise men, and if they have the sense to elect them. Otherwise the individuals, however good and brave and sensible they are, are like noughts, vast quantities of hollow, round valueless noughts. Place a statesman at their head, and it is like the digit in a written figure, it gives value to all the noughts... take away the digit, and the noughts are noughts again, and they can be blown away or dispersed by any chance wind," says a random villager in a taverna a stone's throw away from where ancient battles turned into blockbuster movies were fought.
What must it be like to live with history so close, so tangible? To be able to swim to where the ancients believed was the entrance to Hades, or to be able to visit islands that Homer wrote about, where Paris and Helen trod? This wonder-full book's every chapter is the result of this dizzying height of emotion.
But for this reader, the most fascinating chapters were the ones inspired by ikons, that uniquely Orthodox religious art form. In Fermor's hands, what could have been art criticism became a transcendent piece touching on theology and the visible difference of Western Christianity from the East after the Schism of 1054.
"Western Christs expose their wounds; Eastern Christs sit enthroned in ungesticulating splendor... religious art in the East sought to bring man to God's level, and in the West, bring God to man's; each laying stress on a different half of Our Lord's nature... Knowing that the representation of Christ as God was as impossible a task as uttering the ineffable, they tried to indicate the immediately assimilable incarnation of Christ in such a way that it gave wings to the mind and the spirit and sent them soaring through and beyond the symbol to its essence, the Transcendent God, with whom, as they themselves had defined, He was consubstantial... in the foredoomed task of indicating the unfathomable mystery of Godhead in visible terms, the Greek ikon-painters chose the hardest way. They sought ingress to the spirit, not through the easy channels of passion, but through the intellect."
It was also fascinating to read of the syncretism of the ancient Greek pantheon merged with Christianity, as this fusion of prehispanic religion and Catholicism is also present in this reader's culture... how Hermes became the archangel Michael, Athena became the Blessed Virgin, Helios became the prophet Elijah, and so many others!
All told, this book and its sequel are wonderfully written tributes to Time and how she carves out man's destiny, and how there are traces of our historical beginnings everywhere, if we would only peel back the film from our eyes and gaze at our world with wonder, the way Paddy Fermor did.
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