Golden isle

Three times I've been to the island of Rhodes:  The first time, while traveling alone for six weeks with a backpack throughout the eastern Mediterranean, hanging out in student hostels.  The second, an all-too-short trip to Italy and Greece with a former law school classmate.  And the third, overnight, aboard a Turkish gulet with family members, as a side-trip while exploring the near-by Turkish coast.

Rhodes was always Rhodes, timeless -- and yet, changing with the different periods of my life. As you might expect, it was that first visit, not long after finishing college, that lingers most strongly in my memories.  And it's those memories that are deliciously brought again to consciousness by my re-reading of Lawrence Durrell's Reflections on a Marine Venus. 

Durrell is best known for his fictional, somewhat Rashomon-esque Alexandria Quartet -- four novels I managed to devour one year on Maui, all in one week, arising each morning at dawn and reading on the patio for several hours until other family members finally came to life.  I'd be at a loss now to describe the story line; what I remember are the richly realized personalities of the characters and the haunting sense of life lived vividly in a fantastic and multi-layered Alexandria -- a city that no longer exists as described and, sadly, was always a fantasy of Durrell's imagination.

Durrell's short memoir of his days on Rhodes seems closer in tone and approach to the fictional Quartet than it does to his also excellent, but less impressionistic, memoir of life on Cyprus, Bitter Lemons, which I've discussed in an earlier post.   For Reflections on a Marine Venus is nothing if not impressionistic.

After spending World War II in Alexandria as a press attaché to the British embassy, Durrell was sent to Rhodes in 1945 to handle communications for the occupying British forces -- specifically, to publish newspapers in English, Turkish and Greek for the island's residents.  As described in his memoir, at least, his official journalistic activities seem to have been secondary to his social life and to his delight in returning to the Greek civilization that he loved so much.

Although times were hard -- he mentions the eating of Spam on several occasions -- he seems to have lived in a joyous dream world.  He had the company of British friends, both military and non-military, who shared to varying degrees his highly educated appreciation of history and nature.  His girlfriend from Alexandria came to live with him.  His job took him not only all over Rhodes, but throughout the Dodecanese island group of which Rhodes was the largest member.  He was fluent in Greek, and at ease in talking with everyone, from Orthodox abbots to illiterate fishermen.

The book discusses the Aegean as it was in 1945, contrasted at times with how it had been at the time of his earlier visits.  Durrell also passes on to his readers a trove of classical, medieval, and modern history and politics. 

Durrell has a well-developed aesthetic sense, and describes scenery in richly lyrical language.

The Aegean is still waiting for its painter -- waiting with all the unselfconscious purity of its lights and forms for someone to go really mad over it with a loaded paint-brush.  Looking down upon it from the sentinel's tower at Castello, from the ancient temple at Lindos, you begin to paint it for yourself in words.  Cerulean sky touched with white cirrus -- such fleece grows between the horns of nine-day goatlets, or on the cocoons of silkworms; viridian to peacock-tail green where the sea threshes itself out against the cliffs.  Prismatic explosion of waves against the blue sky, crushing out their shivering packets of colour, and then the hissing black intake of the water going back.  The billiard-green patch edged with violet that splashes the sea below Lindos.

At times, this literary ornamentation becomes a little tiresome -- Hemingway wouldn't have approved -- but in general it arouses in me a deep longing to live in his own un-hurried, un-touristed era, to see what he saw, and to feel what he felt.  

As I read, I recall my own memories of golden sunlight on marble temples; of the fortified city of the Templars, both forbidding and irresistably attractive; of the silver groves of olive trees; of the cozy harbor filled with fishing boats; of the "wine-dark" sea rolling in far below the high cliffs of Lindos.  The butterflies, the ceaseless buzzing of mid-day cicadas, the cold jugs of cheap local wine.  The outdoor table where your breakfast coffee and rolls are served -- whether graciously on linen, on a hotel terrace, or more convivially on plastic tables in the courtyard of a youth hostel.  The friendliness of the local Greeks, of course, but also of the fellow English-speaking travelers you ran into --  typical kids back home, I suppose, but kids whose minds and manners and sensitivities all seemed uplifted here, their curiosity heightened,  by exposure to the bright light of the Hellenic civilization, modern as well as classical, they found all about them.

Durrell's done it to me again.  I can never go back to being a happily indigent student, nor can I join him as a post-war British press attaché on a newly-liberated Greek island.  But Greece seems to call everyone, regardless of age or education or century.  I'd give much right now to be drinking strong coffee, staring at the blue Aegean, and listening to the steady buzz of the cicadas.

I guess I'll be making a fourth visit to Rhodes.  One of these days.