… because I fell totally and for ever in love with the Greek landscape from the moment I arrived. But with the love came a contradictory, almost irritating feeling of impotence and inferiority, as if Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her.
… in Greece landscape and light are so beautiful, so all-present, so intense, so wild, that the relationship is immediately love – hatred, one of passion.
‘Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn’
‘To live alone?’
‘To live. With what you are.’
She wanted to leave it (Greece) then, never to return. Like so many Greeks. And like so many Greeks she never accepted her exile. That is the cost of being born in the most beautiful and the most cruel country in the world.
Read: The Magus by John Fowles
I love Fowles and The Magus. Probably more than anything else I’ve read. I have similar feelings, but not for Greece, a wee bit further.
I love his contrast between how the British feel about their landscape and the Greek landscape. He is SO right, the English country always feels like a domesticated animal, kinda like a garden.
Which is why he loved and kept his garden in a jungle state. Have you read his Journals? (two big volumes)