v40: What Swims Up

“I was trying to concentrate all my strength on my ardent desire to break through the crust of the mind and penetrate to the dark and dangerous channel down which each human drop is carried to mingle with the ocean.”
- Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

The dolphins came up behind us.

My wife and I were standing shoulder-deep in the gulf off Captiva in the early afternoon of my fortieth birthday. We were talking while the water lifted us a few inches and set us down again. It was almost still, more Caribbean than gulf, as though the blue were being lit from below. The sun was high and my shoulders had begun to tighten from the heat. When I brought my hand to my face, my skin tasted of salt.

A father nearby pointed past us and called to his two young boys.

“Dolphins!”

Kate and I turned and saw nothing except the water closing where they had been. Then they surfaced again, much closer this time. I moved toward them almost without thinking, and after four or five strokes they were near enough that I could almost touch them. When they slipped under again, Kate declared, “On your fortieth birthday! That has to mean something.”

I had brought Zorba the Greek to the island, a paperback I had found two weeks earlier in a dollar bin after years of half-looking for it. I bought it because I had meant to read it for a long time, and because a novel set on the coast of Crete seemed like the right companion for an island vacation.

Found earlier, it might have passed through my hands as merely an adventure story. That may already be too much meaning to put on a dollar-bin paperback.

We had come to Captiva with friends from our hometown, people who had known one another since middle school or earlier. Several of us had turned forty, or were about to, and that was the official reason for the trip. Mostly it gave us an excuse to gather in a house near the water and feel, for a few days, both older than we used to be and exactly the same.

The house had the disorder of all good rental beach houses. Damp towels hung over chair backs. Sunscreen gathered on the kitchen counter beside limes cut in half for rum and Cokes and pineapple margaritas. Half-read books lay open on tables beside sunglasses, empty cans, and phones used more for managing the playlist than calls. I had taken on my usual role as bartender, cranking out pitchers of frozen strawberry and mango daiquiris and leaving behind the kind of mess my friends have learned to forgive so long as the drinks keep coming. The ice disappeared faster than anyone expected.

At night we sat around with drinks in our hands and talked the way people talk when they have known each other for decades. Childhood came back in fragments: old crushes, nicknames, parties, prom outfits, petty dramas, and the various things we had done to get ourselves in trouble. Someone would begin a story and someone else would correct the order of events, or supply the missing detail that made the whole thing both worse and funnier.

Nothing was being accomplished, which was part of the mercy of it.

I have spent much of my adult life among plans. I make them for myself. I make them for other people. I believe in them, sometimes too much, though I know better than to despise what has carried me this far. A plan is one way of admitting that the future matters. Discipline, when properly understood, is a form of respect.

Still, there are days when the habits that help build a life begin to crowd out the life they were meant to serve. Rest becomes recovery, friendship becomes scheduling, and pleasure is asked to explain what it accomplishes. Even a vacation can begin to feel, if one is not careful, like another project to be managed.

Old friends make that harder to sustain. The best ones remember the person before the system took shape. Around them, the adult self loses some of its authority. This is not always comfortable. One would like to think that maturity has refined away the old awkwardness, the vanity, and the wish to be seen in a certain light. Then someone who knew you at sixteen says one sentence and the whole construction is demolished. There is grace in that. Old friends make it difficult for the life you claim to become the whole story.

I was reading Zorba in that atmosphere: tennis in the mornings, sun and saltwater by afternoon, and old stories at night where the days were loose enough to forget what time it was.

The copy was in better shape than most bargain bin books. The spine was still firm and the pages clean - it was probably never read at all. On the back was a sticker from a tourist bookstore in Santorini: 8.50 euros. 

The novel begins with a bookish man trying to do something practical, to prove himself more than a man of books. Kazantzakis’s narrator travels to Crete to manage a lignite mine and brings with him books, plans, seriousness, and the habits of a man who trusts the life of the mind. Then he meets Zorba, a laborer and wanderer whose whole being presses toward contact with the world: work, food, women, music, grief, and anger — the body in motion.

I do not especially like Zorba, which may be one reason I trusted the book. I would gladly share a glass of Zacapa with him and hear him talk too loudly, tell half-true stories, insult me, and praise the sea. But I would not want to be him, or even to be close to him for long. He is too much in nearly every direction, a man with none of the Stoic’s temperance and no wish for it. His charm has danger in it, the sort by which certain men make their vitality feel like a law the people around them must obey. He is funny, generous, alive, and often cruel. He sees through cowardice and abstraction, and he is totally blind to the damage done by his bottomless appetite.

Still, he is hard to dismiss, although not because he is good or wise. His authority comes from living. His body is not an accessory to his thought. It is the place from which he thinks, loves, suffers, and acts. He is philosophy with a cracked heel. He reminds the narrator, and reminded me, that a man may spend his life interpreting the world while remaining strangely untouched by it. One man stands near life with a notebook in his hand; the other waltzes in smelling of wine, sweat, sea-salt, and earth.

I read him in pieces. A chapter before the trip, a few more on the plane, and then by the pool, the book resting facedown beside sunglasses and a sweating Campari spritz. One evening I read with a cigar, using the band as a bookmark. Zorba followed me that way, but the book did not make me want to become him. That would have been too easy. Life still called to me; that was never in doubt. The harder question was how a man at forty answers that call without confusing vitality with escape, or discipline with retreat.

This began to follow me around the island.

I do not want to make a saint of appetite. I have seen enough to know how quickly it can become boring, then destructive. Discipline exists for good reasons, and those reasons do not disappear simply because a man gets tired of hearing about it. I had not reached forty in any crisis of despair. I had reached it with gratitude: a wife I love, a daughter who has remade the world, work that matters, old friends near enough to laugh with, and projects multiplying in the margins of respectable life.

One night, while the others were inside playing a game, I stayed by the pool with Zorba.

I was tired in the way one is tired near the end of a good day: sun-tired, conversation-tired, and a little worn from the excesses of food, drink, and the Florida heat. The book lay open in my hands. Its pages had softened in the damp air. From inside came the sound of voices, then laughter, then the brief rise and fall of a disagreement about the rules.

The narrator, too, was awake. It was the last night of the year, and he had begun, as men eventually do, to render an account of himself. He looked back over his life and found it wanting. Vapid was his word. Incoherent. Hesitating. Above him, his life seemed to gather and dissolve like a cloud changing shape in the wind: a swan, a dog, a demon, a scorpion, each form appearing only long enough to lose itself again.

I knew that cloud.

Then the narrator closed his eyes and tried to force his way downward through himself. He wanted to break through the crust of the mind and descend into the dark channel beneath it, the channel down which each human drop is carried toward the sea. 

That was where the book found me.

Sitting there with the others laughing inside and the wet night engulfing me, I could feel the force of the accusation. I had often believed that the mind could be made strong enough to enter any depth. If the door did not open, one thought harder. If life would not yield, one returned with better tools. Even pleasure could arrive with a small overseer attached: read this because it may become an essay, take the walk because it will clear the mind, rest because it will help you work better. There is truth in all of that, but something is lost when every hour must justify itself.

The sentence about the dark channel stayed with me because I knew the wish to reach some cleaner contact with life before the mind had turned it into argument, system, or commentary. I knew, too, the private absurdity of trying to win such contact by an intensification of the very faculty that kept interfering with it.

The sea does not yield itself to analysis. It receives the body, not the explanation. A man may study the water from the shore, may name its currents and admire its surface, but the old fact remains: he is dry until he enters.

I closed the book for a while and listened to the night.

When the dolphins appeared the next day, I was not prepared for them in any noble sense. I would like to say I entered the gulf in a state of heightened spiritual availability, but that would be a lie, and no doubt make me sound unbearable. I was more likely thinking about dinner reservations, whether we had enough ice, or whether I answered some message I meant to respond to. Life is kind enough, at times, to ignore the quality of our attention.

By then the gulf had gone nearly calm. Kate and I were in the water. A father was pointing for his two boys. I turned too late, then swam a few strokes when the dolphins surfaced again.

None of the Greek associations passed through my mind in the water. Dolphins as rescuers of sailors, companions of poets, or creatures of threshold and transformation. Scholarship arrives late to wonder. What I knew then was that a beautiful creature had come near us from a world adjacent to ours and gone back down before I could ask anything of it.

That was enough.

I had done nothing to summon it. I had not concentrated my way into the encounter, had not planned or deserved or interpreted or improved my way there. I was facing the wrong direction.

That may be why the moment stayed with me. So much of what has mattered most in my life has arrived with some element of surprise: Kate, known before either of us could have understood what such knowing would become; a daughter whose existence has altered every proportion by which I measure the world; work that began as a claim of independence and slowly became a vocation; books found at the hour they could finally be read; friends old enough to remember the unfinished person beneath the present one.

The deepest gifts have rarely entered by the front door.

This does not make intention useless. It only puts intention in its place. A man may cultivate the conditions of reception, but he cannot command what is received. He may enter the water. He cannot summon the dolphin. He may read the book. He cannot decide in advance which sentence will wound him. He may build a life with seriousness and care. He cannot fully author the meaning that life will acquire.

By forty, this should have become obvious. It had not.

Kazantzakis understood this, though perhaps at a temperature higher than I can bear. Late in the book, the narrator resolves that he must learn to run, wrestle, swim, ride horses, row, drive a car, and fire a rifle. He must fill his soul with flesh and his flesh with soul. I read that sentence more than once.

The self is more ancient than our diagrams of it: breath and salt and fatigue and touch, the child one was and the parent one has become, the appetite one fears and the discipline one also fears losing.

The Greeks, who did not pretend to have abolished certain divisions placed Apollo and Dionysus in the same sacred geography. The lucid god and the ecstatic god both had claims. A life ruled only by Dionysus dissolves; a life ruled only by Apollo hardens.

Zorba did not solve that difficulty. His own life was wild, wasteful, often cruel. Perhaps the narrator does not need him because Zorba is whole. He needs him because Zorba carries the half of life he has exiled.

For me, attention may begin in smaller and more civilized ways: to swim more, to row more, to play more, to eat and drink without making pleasure apologize for itself, to inhabit the body as the country in which the soul has been asked to live.

Here Zorba’s defense of folly becomes more than charm. Every man has his folly, he says, and the greatest folly of all is to have none. At twenty, folly is often appetite with a theatrical hat on. At forty, it becomes harder to dismiss. It may be the part of a man that has not yet consented to be reduced to prudence, the part still willing to appear unreasonable in defense of something loved for its own sake.

And death, of course, has entered the room.

At forty, death is still abstract for many of us, though less abstract than it was. Parents age, friends begin to get diagnoses, and the body starts sending reminders. But it is a daughter who makes time visible, because she changes too quickly for denial. The years no longer pass as an idea. They appear in shoes outgrown, phrases abandoned, baby teeth loosened, in a hand that once fit entirely inside your own and now reaches for the world.

Zorba’s final instruction is the hardest because it refuses to be made tidy: act as if death did not exist, and act with death in mind at every moment. For years I heard in that only paradox.

On my birthday, in the water, it seemed closer to a discipline of attention. Held in mind, death gives the hour its weight; forgotten, it lets the hour be lived. A man who remembers too much grows solemn and cramped, forever weighing his experience for significance, and a man who forgets entirely grows trivial. The thing is to let death deepen a life without permitting it to confiscate one.

I am not sure I know how to do this.

That is probably why the dolphin mattered. For a few seconds, the inward commentator fell silent. I was in the water with Kate, on an ordinary blue afternoon that had opened, without my permission, into something no plan could have improved. The drop did not break through to the sea. It found itself already there.

A year ago, closing the v39 essay, I wished that the year ahead might be built more of presence than grasping. I meant it sincerely, as one means such wishes. The answer came more literally than I could have invented, and with less regard for my categories than I might have preferred.

So I will go on planning what submits to planning. I will keep faith with the disciplines that have carried me this far. But I will try to confuse discipline less often with dominion, thought less often with life, competence less often with wholeness. And I will try, in the decade that begins now, to remain available: to the wife beside me in the water, to the daughter who has made time both more frightening and more holy, to the friends who still remember the child beneath the adult, and to whatever chooses to swim up.