Side Trip to Corfu, Greece

There were many things that made my day today but what stood out was Henry Miller’s letters to Anaïs Nin.

The year was 1939 and as the war came closer, and Miller talked of “international gangsterism” and lack of noble statesmen to do the right thing and avert war (sound familiar?), Miller decided to leave France after having lived there for almost ten years. But rather than taking the first boat back to New York City, he made a side trip, to visit his friend Lawrence Durrell on Corfu, Greece. Here’s the house:

Miller had been working hard in the years prior, and Corfu was like a little remote paradise where, for the first time in years, he felt he could relax and forget about work. His descriptions were so colorful that I did some armchair traveling and I simply longed to swim in the Mediterranean again and feel the sun on my skin. Here are some of the more memorable quotes so you can make that same side trip to Corfu with me and forget about the mundane lives we’re all living:

Corfu really is marvelous. It’s somewhere between Palestine, Arizona and Greece. […] It’s a world of intense light. […] We have two or three little secret coves where we go bathing in the raw– It’s like a tonic. I go about now in a pair of khaki shorts and barefooted. You’d be amazed to see the rough jagged cliffs I scramble over in bare feet. […] And the rowboat is splendid exercise. Here the fishermen stand up to row their huge boats and we imitate them. Their boats are beautiful. Like Van Gogh pictures. […] I’m crazy about the olives, the olive oil for inside and out, the wonderful homemade bread, the luscious fruits and vegetables. It’s a good healthy diet […] Whether I shall ever write anything here or not, I don’t know […] I am more interested in the state of my feet, my agility, my sunburn, my rowing and swimming progress, etc. Going naked is in itself the greatest cure. I think 9/10 of all the world’s neurotics could be cured thus— and thus alone. Just by the sun and water playing on the naked body. It’s very chastening, too. There’s nothing sensual about it. One becomes a rock or a tree.

and:

The whole country seems as if it had existed from eternity. One feels it will go on forever, always bare and always full of surprises. Often, amidst the most barren rocks, in the most inaccessible places, one sees a little monastery, shrine or sanctuary. Larry says it’s the country of the ‘desert fathers’. Anyway, from time immemorial men have lived here in voluntary and blissful solitude, warmed and nourished by sea and sky. One can still do it. There are two categories, two types of men here– the islanders and the highlanders. Like Jung’s division of extroverts [sic] and introverts. And then there must be another rarer type also, who knows how to look above and beyond, as well as within and without. These were the men, I feel, who gave Greece its form. Greece stands between the Arabian world and the European world, between the Occident and the Orient, in every way.

I went online to see what real estate goes for in Corfu. Land and property seem dirt cheap. Take a look at this one…

Ah– to have a house looking out over an expanse of sky and water and… when the eye can no longer take it all in, to fall asleep to the sound of the waves…