The Colossus of Maroussi – Henry Miller

On the Greek mainland and Corfu, where he visits Laurence Durrell just as the Second World War is breaking out, the brazen first-person protagonist of the Tropics and Sexus is seen as a more Whitmanesque character, who celebrates with unalloyed enthusiasm the vitality of the people and physical and psychic landscapes of Greece. He still lives boldly and does not let money condition his experience. He is never less than outspoken and stands up for what he values.
 
My favourite anecdote is Miller’s encounter with the mayor of a mountain village on Corfu and the splendid time they have of it trading lies for the sake of pure imaginative pleasure. What a way for two strangers to meet! At one point, they both pretend to speak Chinese. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
 
In the end, though, I tired of the purple prose and my abiding impressions are all from the book’s first half, in particular Miller’s anti-war commentaries, which are not national-political in nature but concerned with the health of the soul of the world. In Epidaurus, he has an epiphany of the peace of the heart, “positive and invincible, demanding no conditions, requiring no protection. It just is. If it is a victory, it is a peculiar one because it is based entirely on surrender, a voluntary surrender, to be sure…. No man can really say that he knows what joy is until he has experienced peace.… Our diseases are our attachments, be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, phobias, gods, cults, religions, what you please. Good wages can be a disease just as much as bad wages. Leisure can be just as great a disease as work. Whatever we cling to…”