The Sacred and Profane

Snapshots from Greece and a meditation on the end of a world.

December 2016. Absolute stillness in Athens on Christmas morning. After a night of garbled dreams of headlines and pundits, I walked past shuttered storefronts covered with graffiti in search of my Christmas present: a pack of cigarettes after quitting for six months. The Greeks know how to smoke. In America we stand on cold sidewalks with shamed faces; here smokers luxuriate in a grey haze like it’s 1962. Rolling cigarettes is a family activity. Starbucks has a smoking section. I savored the familiar box in my palm, the sacrament of unwinding the cellophane and peeling back the gold foil, the warm raisin smell of tobacco and the cupping of a flame. How could this dramatic act of fire, smoke, and breath ever have become a mindless routine, let alone something I wanted to quit? Beneath a heat lamp at a café, I admired the pigeons while reading about the last days of Socrates. An ashtray and a complementary pastry appeared on the table.

Psyche is the Greek word for breath, evidence of a graceful relationship between spirit and flesh until Socrates split the soul from the body, creating the ghost in the machine and leaving the mind to wonder: if God is so perfect and complete, why did He bother making this kind of world? (“Because the divine must be expressed,” said Plotinus.) I closed the book, lit another cigarette, and thought about my soul. But mostly I struggled to resist my telephone’s siren song of breaking news.

An old man whispered to his dog. A waitress touched up her lipstick in the mirror. The Parthenon floated upstairs. Upstairs. That’s how the chatty cab driver described the hills, and the slope towards the sea is downstairs. This seems like a wonderful way to look at the world: the city as a house. Pigeons pecked at the checkered tiles for flakes of pastry while across the Atlantic the next American president brayed about his television ratings and promised a nuclear arms race for the holidays.

I expected to spend my days in Greece researching ritual and considering the erosion of myth. I imagined tranquil afternoons in libraries and museums, my footsteps echoing through marble halls. But there is no escaping the world and I spent far too much time staring into screens instead of contemplating…