Zorba the Greek (Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas) is a novel written by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, first published in 1946. It is the tale of a young Greek intellectual who ventures to escape his bookish life with the aid of the boisterous and mysterious Alexis Zorba. The novel was adapted into a successful 1964 film of the same name by Michael Cacoyannis.
The book opens in a café in Piraeus, just before dawn on a gusty autumn morning in the 1930s. The narrator, a young Greek intellectual, resolves to set aside his books for a few months. He is about to begin reading his copy of Dante's Divine Comedy when he feels he is being watched; he turns around and sees a man of around sixty peering at him through the glass door. The man enters and immediately approaches him to ask for work. He claims expertise as a chef, a miner, and player of the santuri, or cimbalom, and introduces himself as Alexis Zorba, a Greek born in Romania. The narrator is fascinated by Zorba's lascivious opinions and expressive manner and decides to employ him as a foreman.
The narrator absorbs a new zest for life from his experiences with Zorba and the other people around him, but reversal and tragedy mark his stay on Crete. Financially spent, he has overcome his demons, his internal "no."
“The meaning of the words, art, love, beauty, purity, passion, all this was made clear to me by the simplest of human words uttered by this workman.”
The end of the film, business ruined, money lost, what else do you do but dance? They lost everything and gained it all.
Fantastic quotes from Nikos Kazantzakis, writer of Zorba the Greek. "A man needs a little madness, or else... he never dares cut the rope and be free. As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 412
All my life I struggled to stretch my mind to the breaking point, until it began to creak, in order to create a great thought which might be able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and to console mankind. "Odyssey of Faith" in TIME magazine (6 June 1960)
I said to the almond tree: "Speak to me of God." and the almond tree blossomed. The Fratricides (1964)
Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us create — so long as the warmth of this earth endures, so long as no earthquakes, cataclysms, icebergs or comets come to destroy us — let us create for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle. Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all. I surrender myself to everything. I love, I feel pain, I struggle. The world seems to me wider than the mind, my heart a dark and almighty mystery.
Having seen that I was not capable of using all my resources in political action, I returned to my literary activity. There lay the battlefield suited to my temperament. I wanted to make my novels the extension of my own father's struggle for liberty. But gradually, as I kept deepening my responsibility as a writer, the human problem came to overshadow political and social questions. All the political, social, and economic improvements, all the technical progress cannot have any regenerating significance, so long as our inner life remains as it is at present. The more the intelligence unveils and violates the secrets of Nature, the more the danger increases and the heart shrinks. As quoted in Nikos Kazantzakis (1968) by Helen Kazantzakis, p. 529
This passage was used for Kazantzakis' epitaph:
"Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα, δε φοβούμαι τίποτα, είμαι λέφτερος." • I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. • Variant translation: I expect nothing. I fear no one. I am free.
The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!