Halfway through Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis’s narrator receives a letter from “a mountain somewhere in Tanganyika,” sent by an old schoolmate named Karayannis. Formerly a professor of theology, Karayannis had absconded to Africa after hooking up with a female student. Sitting alone on a stone in Crete, the narrator reads the letter and reflects: “Once again I felt flashing inside me the urge to leave, not owing to any need — since I am fine on this seashore where I comfortably fit in and lack nothing — but owing to my compelling desire to see and touch as much sea and land as possible before I die.”
At the start of the quarantine, I had decided to reread Zorba in an unimaginative tribute to the fact that I was supposed to have traveled to Greece in May. The golden sand and crashing waves of Zipolite served as the backdrop for my reading-slash-mental-boomeranging between other lands and seas, even as I lacked nothing on this seashore aside from immunity to periodic eviction by Mexican soldiers and police. In my case, the seeing and touching of everything was also a convenient way to postpone sorting my shit out or committing to a single identity, as the constant motion enabled a suspension of conventional reality and the illusion, at least, of an elongation of time, into which I endeavored to cram as much land and sea as possible between myself and mortality.
Since the onset of my travels in 2003, I had become more comfortable with the idea of one day ceasing to exist, a prospect that had disproportionately preoccupied my childhood in Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas — to the extent that I would remain awake at night calculating the number of years/hours/minutes I might reasonably have left based on current American life expectancy. In the evenings, I could be found lying in rigid petrification on the living room rug, imagining myself inside a coffin while my parents watched the newscast. It’s possible that I simply associated death with failure in the prevailing context of cutthroat capitalism; after all, I could not be the best, most successful student and person ever if I was dead. At any rate, the peripatetic urges that were to consume me later in life would provide a welcome distraction from morbid fixation. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.