Arete: Virtue, influence, and the writers who stay
Source: NEOS KOSMOS
Arete ἀρετή – is one of my favourite Greek words. The standard translation is virtue –excellence, and goodness. This is technically correct, but the sound and associations in English miss the most vital parts. Arete was also the minor Greek goddess who offered protection and hospitality to Odysseus, Medea, and Hercules – all troubled souls.
Of course, arete is about moral behaviour. This sounds like a goal to aspire to. A distant peak. Yet, in Greek arete also connotes a sensual radiance, that is already there. As a word, to my ear, it is tender and profound. It shimmers and echoes like a deep blue sea.
In Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird we see two kinds of virtue. The young girl, Scout, at first appears wild and temperamental. She is always rushing out and coming home with scuffs and bruises. Yet, in her wide-eyed innocence, there is the virtue of boundless curiosity and fierce care. She explores her neighbourhood with excited pleasure and without any of the acquired blinkers of prejudice.
Her father, who famously defended an innocent Black man, is cast in granite. Cool and even. However, he also giggles with infinite warmth at all his daughter’s mischief and will stare down any aggressor.
Scout is our innate virtue, and Atticus is the most elegantly cultivated and broad-shouldered version of cultured virtue. I read this book once at high school. The essence will never leave me.
Fotis Kapetopoulos – not commonly associated with arete – asked me to write this short piece on authors who have influenced me. At first, I recoiled at the word influence.
I could not find an example of someone who has either changed my path in life, or provided a model which I could fill with my own content. As my brother often complains, my first impulse is to be contrarian. I paused.
Then I recalled the advice that the writer Deborah Levy once gave me in a bar in Cambridge, “leave academia”. She could see that institutions can crush a part of your soul, and eventually make you hate the things you love.
At that time, I thought John Berger was the biggest influence in my life. But in retrospect, I think that such big figures are brought into your life because a small part of them is already there. Berger could distil complex ideas into a metaphor that combined scientific precision and poetic suggestiveness. In his novel To the Wedding, he compared the experience of listening to rebetiko music to being tattooed. He also lived one step ahead of me. He could express feelings on a page that I was still struggling to utter.
On the cover of my Hogarth edition of C.P. Cavafy Collected Poems is a line drawing by David Hockney. There are two men in the living room. One is lying on a couch, the other is leaning above him.
Their gaze is heading in opposite directions. They seem sated and comfortable. While love appears to be at hand, there is still a longing for something else. Disquiet simmers.
As my friend Martin Flannagan noticed Cavafy has the gift of making little memories and lost passions seem noble. He can allow grief to surface without the need to either surrender into the whirlpool of revenge or the promise of salvation.
There is a prickly kind of acceptance and a lambent irony in Cavafy’s poems. He is clear-sighted in his exposure of the dark forces that are pressing down on us, but also, he does not shy away from unpeeling the darkness within our own desires. I read Cavafy from time to time. Always out loud and very slowly. If I find his words assuring it is in part because of this tempo.
He feels close by. He is still living in the apartment above the one with the red light. People like this can stay.
Prof. Nikos Papastergiadis, is a cultural historian and author of many books; his most recent is ‘John Berger and Me’.
The original article: belongs to NEOS KOSMOS .
