Read Online Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell - Free Book Online Page A

appropriate flourish.)
    Our acquaintance was pushed no further that evening for the Count’s wife appeared with a sheaf of letters for him to address and stamp; and he took his leave, once more with the same exquisite courtesy.
    I spent a while longer in the garden, taking the temperature of Syracuse, so to speak; sniffing the warm night like a hound, to divine (or imagine) the faint smell of brine from the invisible sea. The place gave off a feeling of peace and plenitude, and the late moon would rise long after I had drifted into sleep to touch the graceful flowering bushes of hibiscus and oleander which lined the streets. It was in a sense the real beginning of our trip, the first great city whose antiquities we were to visit in any detail; up to now we had been mobilizing ourselves, getting to know one another, improvising. But now the ice had been broken and we were a distinct party. As I came back into the hotel to go to bed I saw the Microscopes sitting in the lounge, theman with his head buried in L’Equipe (The Team)—a weekly sports paper which he had hardly left out of his sight throughout the trip. Either he had a number of copies or he was reading one special issue over and over again. But his concentration was quite ferocious and proof against any other pleasure one might offer him in the way of ruins or landscapes, even food and drink—for at meals he read at table. Well, as I passed them I saw his wife put her hand on his arm and say with real feeling, “ Eric, si tu continue comme ça je sens que je perderai l’oriflamme .” It was so ridiculous as a remark that it took my breath away.

    â€œI remember you saying once that there was something very slightly suspect about our Mediterranean raptures—I mean the islomania we invented in Cyprus and which characterized all your previous poetic transactions with Rhodes and Corfu. I suddenly recalled this remark on a sunny afternoon when I was sitting in the Greek theater of Syracuse, knitting, and reading while the children foraged for stalks of grass to chew.”
    She had forgotten the provenance of the remark, but I recalled it quite distinctly. It had suddenly occurred to me that we had given very little thought to what these islands, Cyprus or Sicily, must have been like before the extraordinary efflorescence of templesand statues had taken place—all the paraphernalia of a fully-fashioned and self-confident culture which had created plenty out of barrenness, beauty out of the incoherence of a nature run wild; piety, literacy, art. It is sufficient to cast an eye over the leavings of earlier cultures to be aware of the sweeping definitive-ness of the Greek thrust—its glorious freedom from self-doubt, hesitation. But it was as much due to what they planted in the ground as to what they erected upon it in the way of cities, temples, and harbors. In a sense all our thinking about the Mediterranean crystallized around the images planted here by the Greeks—in this Greater Greece, so aptly named. In Sicily one sees that the Mediterranean evolved at the same rhythm as man, they both evolved together. One interpreted itself to the other, and out of the interaction Greek culture was first born. If it becomes clearer in Sicily than elsewhere it is because when the Greeks arrived their homegrown culture was at meridian, and the similarity of landscape and climate did not impose upon them any modifications, either of worship or of jurisprudence or of politics. Athens evolved as piously and rigorously here as it did in Greece proper. I use the name loosely for the first settlers came from various places; but the cultural problems, even to their bitter differences and disputes, were first broached in Athens and by Athens. In a sense the word Greek and the word Athens are interchangeable except for purists and historians.
    Comparing site for site—Neolithic and Greek in Sicily—one stumbles upon the fact that before