Feta Accompli

It's the time of year (well, perhaps one among many) when my thoughts turn to things Mediterranean.  Tomatoes are ripe and seductive, mounds of peppers delight in souks and markets, eggplants are smoky, dusky, purple as dusk over Mallorca or eastern Crete.

I've pulled out Henry Miller's intemperate love letter to Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi, to revel in the language of someone who feels about the land as I do.

"And what is it about Greece that makes you like it so much?" asked some one.
    I smiled.  "The light and the poverty," I said.
   "You're a romantic," said the man.
   "Yes," I said, "I'm crazy enough to believe that the happiest man on earth is the man with the fewest needs.  And I also believe that if you have light, such as you have here, all ugliness is obliterated.  Since I've come to your country I know that light is holy:  Greece is a holy land to me."

It is high noon.  I want to have my lunch in Phaestos.  We push on.  The rain has stopped, the clouds have broken; the vault of blue spreads out like a fan, the blue decomposing into that ultimate violet light which makes everything Greek seem holy, natural and familiar.  In Greece one has the desire to bathe in the sky.  You want to rid yourself of your clothes, take a running leap and vault into the blue.  You want to float in the air like an angel or lie in the grass rigid and enjoy the cataleptic trance.  Stone and sky, they marry here.  It is the perpetual dawn of man's awakening.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Feta Can, Crete