Greece is a place I have long yearned for.
When the airplane crossed the Corinth Canal after flying in from the Ionian Sea, I saw the Greek mountains bathed in the setting sun and the evening clouds glowing like molten gold on Greek armor. I called out the name of Greece — the name that once drove Byron, entangled by a woman, onto the battlefield; the name that nurtured the poetic spirit of the Greek misanthrope Hölderlin; the name that gave courage to the character in Stendhal’s Armance as he stepped onto the final notes of his life’s scale.
From the public bus carrying me from the airport to the city center, I glimpsed through the window the Acropolis of the ancient Greek city lit by the night lamps.
Now I am in Greece. I am drunk with boundless happiness — though my laziness about booking a proper hotel has forced me into a dingy third-rate inn, though inflation makes a meal in a first-class restaurant cost seventy thousand drachmas, though I may be the only Japanese in this town at this hour, and though I know not a word of Greek and cannot even read the shop signs.
I let my pen run freely. Today at last I have seen the Acropolis of the ancient Greek city! I have seen the Parthenon! I have seen the Temple of Zeus! In Paris, strapped for cash, I had almost given up hope of making this journey; these scenes often appeared in my dreams. For that reason, forgive me if I set down my pen for a moment.
The exquisite azure of the sky is indispensable to ruins. Had the columns of the Parthenon been framed instead by the gloomy skies of Northern Europe, the effect would surely have been halved. This effect is so striking that one imagines the blue sky was prepared in advance for these ruins — a cruel, serene azure that seems to have foreseen the temple’s doom at the hands of the Turkish army. This is no idle fancy. Look at the Theater of Dionysus. Here the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides were performed without cease, and the same blue sky gazed silently upon their struggles unto extinction.
As tragedy, the Temple of Zeus is more beautiful than the Acropolis itself. Only fifteen columns remain at the base. Two of them stand isolated, their centers roughly fifty meters apart from the rest. In contrast, these two sections display a beauty that is not left-right symmetrical. Suddenly it reminded me of the layout of the rock garden at Ryōan-ji.
In Paris my weariness with symmetry was no exaggeration. In architecture, needless to say, but also in politics, literature, music, and drama, the French love of measure and methodological consciousness everywhere vaunts left-right symmetry. The result is Paris’s “excess of measure,” which weighs heavily on the tourist’s spirit.
The “method” of French culture finds its master in Greece. Greece now lies before our eyes, its ruins reclining beneath this cruel blue sky. Moreover, the architect’s method and consciousness have been transformed, deliberately allowing visitors to discover unexpectedly the beauty that belongs to ruins alone.
The asymmetrical beauty of Olympia was by no means produced according to the artist’s conscious intent.
Yet the asymmetry of the Ryōan-ji rock garden is the full realization of the artist’s consciousness. It would be more accurate to call it obstinate intuition than consciousness. Japanese artists never rely on method. The beauty they conceive is not universal but singular. In the fact that its result cannot be altered, it does not differ from Western beauty. Yet the effort that produces such a result is more effective in action than in method. That is to say, stubbornly forging intuition and ceaselessly attempting is everything.
From every action the beauty captured cannot be evaded or abstracted. Japanese beauty is perhaps the most concrete of things.
This posture of ultimate beauty explored by intuition is astonishingly akin to the beauty of ruins. The impression in the artist’s mind is often linked to the creation of beauty and at the same time to destruction. The artist not only creates but also destroys. His creation often arises from a presentiment of annihilation. In sketching some ultimate form of beauty, the completeness depicted is sometimes the completeness that confronts annihilation, sometimes the completeness that imitates destruction in order to contend with it. Thus creation nearly loses form. This is because, when the immortal gods create mortal beings, the bird’s exquisite song finds fulfillment in dying together with the bird’s body. But if the artist, in creating the same song, wishes it to survive the bird’s death, he will not create the bird’s mortal body but will seek to create the invisible immortal bird. This is music; the beauty of music begins with the death of form.
The Greeks believed in the immortality of beauty. They carved the complete beauty of the human body in stone. I do not know whether the Japanese believe in the immortality of beauty. The concrete beauty they contemplate, like the body, has its day of perishing, and so they often imitate the empty, silent image of death. The asymmetrical beauty of the rock garden evokes the immortality of death itself.
What kind of beauty is the beauty of the Olympia ruins? I fear that the beauty of ruins and broken walls is founded upon the method of complete left-right symmetry according to the overall structure. The missing portion of the composition in the broken walls allows us easily to glimpse it. Whether the Parthenon or the Erechtheion, when we imagine the lost parts, it is not by intuition but by inference. The joy of that imagination is less the poetry of fancy than the intoxication of intellect. Seeing all this, our emotion is that felt upon beholding the skeletal form of universal matter.
Moreover, one might consider that the emotion given by ruins surpasses that of seeing them in their original form not merely for this reason. The method of beauty conceived by the Greeks is to reweave life, to recompose nature. Valéry too once said: “Order is a great anti-natural plan.” The ruins have accidentally liberated the immortal beauty conceived by the Greeks from the Greeks’ own bonds.
In every part of the Acropolis we feel the Greek mountains — Mount Lycabettus to the east, Mount Parnassus to the north, and the island of Salamis in the Saronic Gulf before us — riding the violent Greek wind that beats against my cheeks and whistles in my ears. Their wings are born from the broken parts of the ruins, while the surviving ruins are stone. Precisely because of what has been lost, people have gained wings and can soar from there.
From the Acropolis’s azure sky we see life freed from its bonds, the immortal and invisible bodies of the gods spreading their wings in flight. In the gaps between the marble blocks we see scarlet poppies blazing open and wild wheat-ears swaying in the wind. The little temple of Nike has no wings, yet this is no accident: the wooden Nike without wings has long since vanished — meaning she has already obtained her wings.
Not only the Acropolis — even the column group of the Temple of Zeus, those mournful columns standing upright, made me feel as if I were seeing Prometheus freed from his bonds. This is not a high platform, yet because of the low grass around the ruins the marble of the temple appears even more vivid, brimming with life.
Temple of Olympian Zeus (Olympieion)
Today I am still sunk in endless intoxication, as though seduced by Dionysus. In the morning I spent two hours on the marble seats of the Theater of Dionysus. In the afternoon, for one more hour, I wandered the grass, lost in contemplation of the column group of the Temple of Zeus.
Today again the sky is exquisitely blue, the wind exquisite, the sunlight fierce. Yes, the Greek sun exceeds mildness; it is too naked, too strong. From the bottom of my heart I love this sunlight and this wind. I dislike Paris; I do not like the Impressionists. It is because of that mild and moderate sunlight.
Of course one could say this is subtropical sunlight. On the outer wall of the Acropolis there is already a luxuriant growth of cactus. At this moment, as spectator to the pines, cypresses, cacti, and yellow gramineous plants, I am gazing down from the higher seats of the empty Theater of Dionysus upon the vacant stage.
The swallows that Anacreon once sang of dart past, casting their shadows on the semicircular stage. The little birds flutter their white breasts, flying back and forth above the Theater of Dionysus and the orchestra. Every little hut is at rest; the swallows cry impatiently and wheel about.
Seated in the priest’s chair of Dionysus, I heard the insects chirping. Earlier a Greek boy of twelve or thirteen had clung to my side and refused to leave — whether he wanted money or the English cigarette I was smoking, or perhaps wished to teach me the ancient Greek love of boys, I do not know. If it was the last, I already knew it.
The Greeks believed in the external world; that is a great thought. Before Christianity invented “spirit,” human beings lived proudly without any such thing. The inner world the Greeks conceived always maintained left-right symmetry with the outer world. In Greek drama there is not the slightest trace of the spiritual things Christianity considered. One may see this as the repeated lesson that an excess of inwardness inevitably invites revenge. We cannot separate the performance of Greek drama from the Olympic Games. Beneath this strong and dazzling sunlight, contemplating the muscular pantheistic equilibrium of athletes — constantly leaping yet still, constantly destroying yet preserved — I felt happiness.
In the Theater of Dionysus only the squatting statue of Dionysus as ornament remains, together with the reliefs around it. Behind the theater we see stones piled like a quarry; fragments of draped garments, broken columns, and scraps of naked bodies lie scattered everywhere, as though a tragedy had just occurred.
Stage relief from the Theatre of Dionysus.
I moved from seat to seat, spending time equal to the performance of a tragedy. From the priest’s seat, the people’s seats, or any other seat, one could hear the lines of Greek drama clearly through the mask and see the actor’s body clearly change with its sharp shadow. Just then a British naval officer with a camera appeared on the semicircular stage, so one could easily measure the scale of the theater and the actor’s height by eye.
To revisit Olympia I walked for a while along the wide promenade of the Acropolis. My necktie flapped against my shoulder; an old gentleman passed by, his white hair tousled by the wind.
While viewing the Temple of Zeus I discovered another perfect spot. It lay on the grass between the thirteen columns and the two central ones. I sat down there, gazing at the thirteen columns as though at a marching column of troops.
Thus the central six, the four on the right, and the three on the left formed separate groups, neatly dividing the sky seen through the temple into two. Yet the central six had greater weight; the four on the right and the three on the left pressed toward the center with an unbalanced, slightly inferior sense of mass. The foremost central column led the five behind it, appearing austere and noble.
In the pictures framed by the temple’s left and right sides, with the distant Greek village as background, two or three cypresses stood. The sky visible through the temple was cut horizontally, about three-quarters of the way down from the horizon, by a gentle brown mountain range winding past the columns. In the upper quarter of that space overflowed an incomparably beautiful azure sky.
From this spot the temple was simply a poem.
I gazed at the temple for more than an hour. I rose at exactly the right moment — just then the tour bus arrived. The poetic domain I had occupied until that moment was taken over by noisy sightseers, invaded en masse.
Watching their figures, I felt an even deeper melancholy. Because I had no better choice, tomorrow I too would become one of the passengers on that tour bus, heading for Delphi.
Excerpt from The Cup of Apollo (アポロの杯), 1952
