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There is a scene in Patrick Leigh Fermor's superb book on the Mani that would appear to capture the essence of Greek hedonism as one could know it in the decades before and immediately after the Second World War, when the influence of foreign television and commerce had not yet altered the imagery and substance of pleasure in the provinces. Leigh Fermor tells his readers that it was a 1950s feast day in the "glaring white town" of Kalamata , north of his village, perhaps the festival of St. John the Baptist that marks the summer solstice; the heat was explosive, the town waterfront "crowded with celebrating citizens in liquefaction." Leigh Fermor, his wife, Joan, and their friend the writer Xan Fielding sat down to eat their taverna dinner at a table set out at the water's edge on the flagstones that "flung back the heat like a casserole with the lid off." Suddenly they decided to pick up their iron table, neatly laid out, and set it down a few yards out to sea, followed by their three chairs, then by the three of them sitting down with the cool water up to their waists. They weren't the first or the last to offer that kind of challenge to the heat at a Greek shore, but they were unusual in that they were fully dressed. Yet the really significant action occurred when the waiter came out, gazed in surprise at the space they'd left empty on the flagstone quay, then, "observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure," stepped without further hesitation into the sea and "advanced with a butler's gravity" to put down their meal before them: three boiled fish, "piping hot, and with their golden brown scales sparkling." That waiter's tolerant flicker of pleasure tells all, even more than that others on the quay sent their seaborne fellow diners can after measuring can of retsina, and a dozen boats gathered around to help them consume the complimentary wine, and a mandolin arrived with the moon and the Dog Star to accompany rembetika songs in praise of hashish. Anyone sitting by or in the Mediterranean who has slowly taken apart and savored a broiled porgy or snapper or sea bass (even Leigh Fermor's kefali), the fish fresh from the sea and bathed amply in an olive oil and lemon sauce, will recognize why no Greek citizen devoted to pleasure would think of disturbing, except in a celebratory way, any table holding such a succulent, earthy gift from the gods. As we have seen from the gourmet commitment of Katsimbalis' Athenian circle, the provinces weren't alone in their devotion to the ecstasies of food and drink at mid-century, but even today, in the remoter areas, they still provide easy means with local products and often an essential backdrop: land in touch with the sea, or mountains delineating the sky. In the remoter provinces you encounter the kind of landscape closest to that which Seferis identified as essentially Greek, not grand or stately, as one might say of landscapes outside Greece, but "a whole world: lines that come and go; bodies and features, the tragic silence of a 'face'" - a perception he finds difficult to put into words but summarizes as "a kind of process of humanization" that comes with the Greek light. It is a process that extends to legendary figures in the landscape, that bring the grand old men of literary history down to earth and allows the poet to see Aeschylus not as the Titan or Cyclops that some imagine him but as "a man of feeling" who expresses himself "close beside us, accepting or reacting to the natural elements just as we all do." Source: Odyssey Magazine
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