#fermor

Live, don't know how long, And die, don't know when; Must go, don't know where; I am astonished I am so cheerful.

A little later, as we talked of the Maniot dirges by which I was obsessed, I was surprised to hear this bloodshot-eyed and barefoot old man say: “Yes, it’s the old iambic tetrameter acalectic.” It was the equivalent of a Cornish fisherman pointing out the difference, in practicality incomprehensible dialect, between the Petrachian and the Spenserian sonnet. It was quite correct. Where on earth had he learnt it? His last bit of information was that, in the old days (that wonderful cupboard!) the Arabs used to come to this coast to dive for the murex.

- Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

The Mani, at the tip of Greece and Europe’s southernmost  promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is  still very much a part of its people’s daily lives.

Ever since I could remember, my boredom threshold had been so high that it scarcely existed at all. With the exception of a minute handful of physical and mental types, surroundings and landscapes and atmospheres and orders of conversation, I was unboreable, like an unsinkable battleship . . . My trouble was that practically everything, not only the most disparate, contradictory and mutually exclusive things and people, but many others that everyone else found repellent, painful, unrewarding, and above all tedious, filled me with the same wild fascination.

- Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO, The Broken Road

Paddy Leigh Fermor was the master of a lush and vivid literary idiom that managed to be simultaneously poetic, learned, philosophical, and mundane, a unique writing style his friend, fellow expatriate, and fellow-philhellene Lawrence Durrell called a “truffled style and dense plumage.”

Trivial things light fuses in the memory.

I had begun to grasp, in the past few weeks, one of the great and uncovenanted delights of Greece; a pre-coming of age present in my case: a direct and immediate link, friendly and equal on either side, between human beings, something which melts barriers of hierarchy and background and money and, except for a few tribal and historic feuds, politics and nationality as well... Existence, these glances say, is a torment, an enemy, an adventure and a joke which we are in league to undergo, outwit, exploit and enjoy on equal terms as accomplices, fellow-hedonists and fellow-victims.

things were read (#289): In Tearing Haste by Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor