Sub specie aeternatis (through the eyes of Eternity)

In a world where finance and economics override all other forms of intellectual activity, and where speculation is what people do on Wall Street, the name of Greece is linked in most people’s minds with words like “debt” and “crisis”. As for “austerity”, that today refers not to a restrained and dignified philosophy, but to brutal cuts in public expenditure aimed at appeasing the same bankers whose lending caused the debt crisis in the first place.

Personally, when I hear Greece mentioned, I like to think of Monemvasia, as it was when I discovered it by accident, over 30 years ago. Hitch-hiking and bussing around Greece with a girl-friend, we were dropped from a beat-up old Peugeot into the small and nondescript modern town on the mainland, from where a narrow causeway leads to a jumble of 3- to 400-year-old stone houses clinging to the side of a huge flat-topped rock. Some are piled on top of each other, some half-ruined and others half-restored, some painted in primary colors and others left in an “austere” gray which is still dazzling in that almost-white Peloponnesian sun. It’s a chaos of shape and form which seems to grow out of the ancient rock and is infinitely soothing to the eye and the soul – unlike, say, the jumble of industrial buildings, apartment blocks, warehouses and freeways that surrounds modern cities.
And then, as we wandered around those narrow streets, picking ripe figs to eat, we came across a path leading up to the top of the rock and to a third and even earlier incarnation of Monemvasia. This was the Byzantine castle, abandoned in the Middle Ages and with little left standing but this ruined church (where the devout from the town below still came to pray and to leave offerings of a few hard-earned drachmas), looking out over endless vistas of clear blue sea and uninhabited rocky coastline, seemingly perched on the edge of the world’s end.

Even at that young age, I was deeply moved by Monemvasia and its message of eternity – the seemingly vast gap between the Byzantium of 1000 years ago and the late 20th century compressed to a 20-minute hike, and all around the stillness of rocks, sea and sky; the changing and the unchanging set in the starkest possible contrast against each other. And there was an additional poignancy for me, traveling with a girl I was madly in love with but whom I feared (rightly) that I would lose once we got back to England – to see so clearly laid out before me that disjunction of people’s fleeting passions and ambitions with what little remains behind when they’ve gone.

Somehow, young as I was, Monemvasia helped me to see that the transitory nature of our hopes and desires doesn’t diminish their value, in fact that’s what gives them their value – but that, like stone walls, they quickly crumble and fade away, leaving only the rocks and the sea and the wind whistling through the empty sky. And the time it takes for this to happen, whether it’s a few years, a few hundred years or even a few thousand years, is a mere blink of the eye of eternity.

Greece, maybe more than any other country, allows us to glimpse the world through those eyes that aren’t ours, but which we can borrow for a moment to acquire some much-needed distance from the tiny concerns which tie us down from day to day. Lifting our eyes to the skies, we remember for a moment who we really are and where we really come from.