Choosing a Greek Island: Durkheim’s Dilemma by Mary Patrice Erdmans
……………..Weariness alone is enough to bring disillusionment for he cannot in the end escape the futility
……………..of an endless pursuit.
…………………………………………………..Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, 1897
We are sitting at Gate 36 in Logan Airport and my knee is bouncing because I don’t know where exactly we are going once we get to Greece. Which island? My partner says open the guidebook to a random page. Yea, right. I turn away and methodically study the 500-page book getting through another dozen of the 1,400 islands before we board. It is May 2000.
We were on our first vacation together. Today it would be cellphones and websites, but then I travelled with a guidebook. I bought Lonely Planet, Greece when snow was still on the ground, and I spent glorious months planning, shopping, planning, packing, planning, and learning my partner does not like to plan.
My partner had never travelled abroad (we both agreed England did not count). We were almost 40 when we met and I had never lived with another person in my adult life (the only person I had shared my bed with on a regular basis was my sister Diane, and we had striped sheets to mark our sides). While my childhood was stationary in my family in Michigan, as an adult, I lived in Thailand and India, hiked the Himalayans, studied in communist Eastern Europe, and walked across Spain. Almost always alone.
Travelling alone doesn’t mean I was alone. I often hooked up with people on the road – we walked together, shared meals, watched sunsets. But where are those people now? I don’t remember most of their names. The memories are mine, alone, and when I try to explain to my partner what it felt like on that peninsula in Thailand watching the sun set and then turning to see the full moon rise, I am limited because I have only words. I wish instead to do that memory *poke* thing – remember in Thailand when *poke* – and we would be back there, the past wonders shared in the present and preserved for the future in the relationship.
We change planes in Brussels at 5am and walk through the fluorescent-light airport a little out of sync as I am long-legged and he is long-waisted. He sleep stumbles behind me, his eyes blinking open-shut-open. My body tingles, my mind begins to twirl, I feel giddy with the freedom of travel – three weeks to wander, to be inefficient, to walk the long way around.
But first I have to choose. Waiting to board the final leg, I pull out Lonely Planet and anxiety rushes through me like nicotine. Terror in bed with pleasure. My partner makes the molecules around me dance when he asks: “Have you chosen?”
And so it is that when we land in Athens I am in a state of agitation because there are simply too many islands. Choice teases me with the fantasy of control. This delusion can lead to (and grow from) what the 19th-century sociologist Emile Durkheim termed excessive individualism, a pathology of modernity. Believing in a right choice, and my ability to make that choice with the right information, I spend too many life minutes squinting at the rice-paper thin pages of a guidebook. For those suffering from excessive individualism, acquisition and abundance stimulate, they do not satisfy.
~~~~~
The world was formed from chaos, and Athens, at first glance, has remained there. Necessity drives but chaos remains – the roads are noisy and crowded with mini-Mercedes, dented VWs, aging Opels, and new Siatas. Our Greek hosts, Alexia and George, drive a car that is too small for my long legs and too big for the old roads. Motorcycles line up at stoplights, tan wrists flex, engines exhaust. Once the light turns green, small cars and big buses play checkers on the road; I whisper Hail Marys in the back seat.
I want to leave Athens as soon as I get there. At Alexia’s apartment, we stretch out long on a bed for a nap. It feels good to lie straight and not kinked like an “L” or an “S,” but we don’t sleep – dogs bark, a baby cries and a jackhammer shakes the building. We go outside for a walk, the green trees are covered in brown spring dust. Everyone wears cool sunglasses even though the sky is a rainy pollution grey.
The next day we visit Alexia’s ya-ya in Kato on the West Peloponnesian coast where the blue sky accentuates the piles of pink and red bougainvillea draping over her white cement veranda. Clusters of lemons in green groves stand sentinel around the house. I am in a pissy mood, whining and fighting with my partner about not helping me choose an island. I leave him to leave my whining and walk down to the beach to watch the sun drown in the water. He spends a pleasant hour on the porch with ya-ya.
As a sufferer of EI (“excessive individualism”), learning to be a couple does not come easily to me. But it is supposed to be good for me because it restrains me. Durkheim knew, even before this modernity thing exploded, that we needed to rein in our desires, to bracket the illusion of unlimited choice. He argued that men who married were less likely to commit suicide because monogamy provided relief from endless pursuit. Just choose one already.
~~~~~
On the suggestion of Alexia and George, we spend a few days on Hydra, our stopgap island close to Athens. Without cars, Hydra is the antonym of Athens. The quietude pulls me into the present. Smooth stones pave the streets wide enough for two donkeys. Trim white houses tinted pink in the early evening bundle on the mountainside. We walk to our small hotel and without unpacking fall into bed and make vigorous love; my body relaxes. I open the wooden shutters and a breeze shuffles across my sweaty thighs. I lean back and close my eyes and find the moment lovely. Goat bells wrinkle the quiet of the village; a neighbor calls out to houses when passing and a donkey hee-haws like gears shifting on an old tractor. The moon rises from behind the mountain, becomes suspended over the harbor and we fall asleep.
The following day we walk along a rocky path to a small pebbly beach where I read a book about Greek beaches. The turquoise water is cold and the afternoon sun hot; for hours I am lost in the feeling of my skin. My partner does not swim because the water is too cold, and he sits under an umbrella because the sun is too hot. He is in a political conversation with George about the future of the Greek economy. I reach for the guidebook in search of our next island. I start a process of elimination – this one is too touristy, this one too far, this one has no bars – but Hydra-like, with each island I cut, two more become possible. I feel an urgency to not miss a thing, to experience the fullness of travel, to somehow live a year in the next three weeks (which is now down to 17 days). This makes the choice overly important. I cross off islands, dog-ear the corners of Lonely Planet, and pull my partner out of his serious conversations, push and prod his mind onto a topic he thinks trivial. “It doesn’t matter,” he grumbles, “choose one.” This pisses me off and I stomp down the stony path back to the hotel alone – or pretending I am alone as the others follow about ten feet behind.
That evening I fall asleep exhausted under the gaze of Cassiopeia, the personification of self-absorption. I wake to the sound of Sunday bells and follow their peals to a small church, light a candle and pray for relief from my pathology of excessive individualism. If I cannot choose the perfect island, then I need to choose one that is good enough.
Outside the church, I sit down on a stone bench, wishing I had a cigarette and contemplating asking a stranger for one, I pull out Lonely Planet and commit to the islands of Naxos for hiking, Koufonisia for solitude, and Santorini because all the guidebooks say not to miss it – body, soul, and tradition (one antidote to modernity).
I go back to our room excited. Relieved. Decisions have been made. Limits placed. I am happy. I settle into the trip after I am committed. I tell him, no more looking. He holds back, perhaps suspicious of the sudden shift in my mood, more likely pissed we didn’t make love in the morning because I chose to go to church.
On the boat back to Athens, between multiple, multiple, multiple sunset shots, I snap a photo of him reading the Greek newspaper. He is not reading reading, only looking at the photos while George is explaining things to him.
~~~~~
Pireaus, 8 am. Aboard the Artemis headed to Naxos. The ship masts in the harbor cut the air like an erector set; rows of patios and colorful awnings climb the hills encasing the peninsula. We crowd the rail on departure but within minutes the thrill of movement wears off and people wander back to their seats. The rumble of the ship engine muffles conversations. My partner takes his novel and goes inside to escape the burning sun. I stay on deck, leaning over the rail wondering what would happen if my prescription sunglasses fell into the water.
On the eight-hour boat ride I begin to live in time – not pass time or steal minutes or waste hours – but live in time, one of the gifts of travel. Time to watch the water foam behind the ship like a bridal train, yards of lace rippling as we waltz through the Aegean. Drops of salty water escape the foaming tail and land on the back of my hand, a tiny ball of water melds into my skin. The sea enters me.
We debark in Naxos and enter a harbor packed with restaurants packed with German tourists drinking Heinekens. Their jabbering voices drown out the sea. I close the guidebook and look for a place to stay on the wooden announcement board — a studio with a veranda overlooking the sea, a fifteen-minute walk from town. It is perfect, I say to my partner. Unplanned and perfect.
In the evening, I again leave the guidebook behind and we walk into town to find a restaurant. We pass through the harbor, through the rows and rows of tables lining the harbor, and turn inland, climbing stone stairs into the old town where thick-walled houses are tucked under spreading tree canopies. Through an open shutter I see a Greek mother with fleshy arms and her fat-cheeked son watching television. We slip into a narrow alleyway and unexpectedly find ourselves at a restaurant with rooftop seating overlooking the harbor. Surrounded by boisterous drinking tourists (Germans), we eat squid stuffed with feta and drink citron liqueur. It was a good evening.
The next morning, I wake early and drink coffee alone on the veranda listening to the water whoosh splash, collide with rock, searching for a place to go: the air reclaims some; the earth absorbs some; the rest escapes back to sea only to rush against the stone, splash, edge up, over and against, and then again retreat into the world of Poseidon who punished vain Cassiopeia by chaining her daughter to a rock to be devoured by a serpent. The sea rushes back and this time drops splatter on my toes.
My partner walks onto the veranda and I pull my eyes away from the roiling water and bury my head in Lonely Planet. I read to him that Naxos is the home of the fierce anti-Nazi Greek nationalist, Manolis Glezos who climbed onto the Acropolis during WWII and replaced the Nazi flag with the Greek flag. He loves this. We decide to take a bus into the mountains to his hometown to do some hiking.
Coming into Apiranthos, we see NATO Nazi spray-painted in red on white walls. We follow the guidebook directions to the trailhead then wander around mountain paths for three hot shade-less hours looking for the right path. The gnarly dry land is unbecoming. From this tight-fisted stone, farmers massage almonds, figs, and olives. Scrawny goats follow us up the side of the mountain, bleating and bawling as we wander. I talk to them, ask them for directions; my partner thinks it is not funny – please read the damn book and find out where we are. But the map in the book seems not to be the land we are walking. We meet an old farmer who speaks at us in Greek; we don’t understand. He sounds angry, pointing in the direction we came from as if he is telling us to get off his property. Only in hindsight do we wonder if maybe he was pointing to the path we had been looking for, the path we thought we wanted.
The afternoon bus takes us back down the mountain (no guard rails, much anxiety, I shut my eyes). We return to our apartment, to the veranda, and watch the sun drop into the quiet blue-green sea. Clouds gather below the sun and catch her rays, a momentary illusion of suspension, and then she plunges into the water. The night begins with a splay of red.
~~~~~
The morning waters are rough, churning and thrusting over rocks. A wind tremor disturbs the fuchsia flowers, the petals flap, flit, twit. The waves punch at the rocks, the water shatters like glass and bursts upward when it crashes. I sit and watch the routine: crash, burst, crash, burst, foamy madness roughly caressing – “Take that, you orderly world! And that! And That!” The sun warms my breast, the wind whistles in my ear like a 1000 Sirens. As a younger traveler, I overused my instincts, leaning into fear, downing it like a shot of Nepali Raksi and surrendering to the consequences. The older me overuses my intellect, marking up pages of travel books, my need to know and control unrelenting. I was happier when I was younger, I think, but maybe not.
What does it mean to be happy, or satisfied, or not unhappy; to smile and sing and feel like the color yellow in front of a garden of daffodils? Happiness rooted in pretty is ephemeral; happiness rooted in security can crash. Happiness rooted in any value or “good” – a good restaurant, the perfect partner, the best Greek island – feeds the fear of not choosing the right thing, the fear of a future disappointment encoded in the capitalist myth that we can have it all (as opposed to the communist myth that we can all have enough).
Does happiness come from limiting our choices, constraining our possibilities? Durkheim believed that desires needed limits, and that social rules provided those limits. But today’s social rules have an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, excessive individualism needs restraining; on the other, the American creed sets up the conditions for never-ending striving. This fertile ground for discontent is embedded in the narrative of American capitalist democracy: the individual is responsible for her own happiness and failure is her fault. To avoid this fault, she is driven to strive, reach, advance, improve, achieve. Michelle Obama said she grew up to the sound of striving (living over her music teacher aunt’s apartment) that pushed her from the south side of Chicago to Princeton and then Harvard and then a prestigious Chicago law firm where she finally recognized that she was not happy, but was still striving.
Striving brings us to the beach to watch the sunset (happiness) until other travelers arrive disturbing us with their chattering (unhappiness), so we move down the beach for a silent viewing (satisfaction) only to find the clouds blocked the sun (dissatisfaction). Striving keeps seekers seeking – buscando buscando — never satisfied; even when they find a great island or restaurant (or partner), they march off searching for another.
This weary striving may be good for capitalism, but I travel for those moments when the buscando falls away. When the guffaws of other tourists are the sounds of an evening we will remember. The film of clouds on the horizon is the sunset. The scrubby trail we walk, the path. The pleasure of travel is being in the moment of movement. At home, a walk to the local pharmacy can be travel. I leave my office, feel the sun, the rain, the whatever, the outside, the motion.
~~~~~
Leaving Naxos. Waiting on the pier to sail, we sit in expansive slow minutes, full seconds of breathing and laughing. We arrive at Koufonisia in the late afternoon and walk from the port town, to our 10-room hotel. Our backpacks make the distance feel longer than it is and we are happy when the dirt road dead-ends at the hotel. It is early in the season; the air has a chill and the hotel only one other guest; both of our rooms are on the second floor with balconies facing east over the Aegean.
We wake to watch the sunrise and sit huddled in pajamas and blankets. The other guest is already on his balcony. Wearing jeans, turtleneck and a fleece vest, he sits perfectly still behind a large black camera with a lens at least a foot in length and as wide as a grapefruit. The minutes are cold. Then the shift: the clouds turn staccato pink, the edges sharp as fire, the underbelly outlined in Midas gold and violent red. The intense palette is momentary and within minutes the full sun is above the horizon.
We crawl back into bed and make the morning long – sleeping, loving, reading, eating yogurt and bananas, drinking ice coffees. We are pretty much satisfied.
Koufonisia is a rocky, scrubby, magnificently vacant island with octopus caves and shallow cold lagoons. In the afternoons, we walk along the coast indented with cliffs of sandstone carved by water. Sand bites at our ankles. At Pori Beach the water is cold, the sun warm, the sand hot. From the rocks, a small gecko watches us stretch out in full nakedness. We relax into the day, swimming, reading, talking, and eating bread and feta cheese. Our skin turns amber. I am happy in this moment, on the sand, reclining into sleep.
These days on Koufonisia are the best – cold sunrises, tall green bottles of beer, diving into turquoise water, flipping like a porpoise, or my version of one. In the evenings, we walk to the western part of the island to watch the sunset; traveling home over white stone paths lit by the moon we have no words, only lips and skin and nightfall. *Poke*
We spend a week here, the days tumbling into each other, and talk about coming back to this island again, maybe for a summer, we say, and rent a house. This would be perfect, we say, this is enough.
~~~~~
We leave Koufonisia in the semi-dark of early morning, the sun still behind the ridge, the wind bare on our knees; the goat bells follow us to the ferry. On the boat heading south, we pass old islands shrouded in blue mist, soft round humps, like stooped weathered men and the rolling bellies of women. The old men and women lie down together. We pass a pod of dolphins – or they pass us. A fin breaks the surface, someone points, we rush to the stern of the boat, the dolphins are crisscrossing in the air, arched bodies fully above the water; couples reach for each other’s hand and give a smile of delight, first at the dolphins and then at each other.
The rest of the three-hour trip to Santorini is loud, hot, and smells of spent gas. The effervescent dolphin moment becomes a memory. From the ferry, a dented blue jeep takes us up to the town of Fira and we start a frustrating look for a good room (this one too small, this one overpriced, this one has no windows, how can we stay there!). We keep searching, searching for a good one. We carry our bulky backpacks through narrow touristy streets, making our way to the caldera, our reason for being on Santorini, the volcanic-formed island of white stone houses built into sheer cliffs overlooking the underwater crater. As car honks recede, the water reappears sun-dazzled in whiteness. We find an opulent apartment: down-feathered bedding, tiled bathroom with shower and deep tub, thick-cushioned chairs in the living room and a patio overlooking the caldera. Perfect, we grumble at each other, enough space to go our separate ways. He sits down in the plushy chair to read and I take a long bath.
In the morning coolness, we climb the white steps leading around the island; in the midday heat, we force ourselves into the city to buy presents for our mothers. The sun burns into my head and we quickly return to the dark comfort of the apartment where we read and nap and bicker. At night, we play backgammon, drink too much wine, and eat an over-priced mediocre meal. A lean cat slinks across the restaurant’s perimeter wall, a dog passes on the sidewalk and she hooks her tail down and catches his eye, he barks, she pulls it up, flip.
~~~~~
At the end of our first vacation together, we move into full-bodied squabbling, spewing hurtful words we will regret or refuse to remember. I sit on the veranda the last night alone. The sun globe drops into the sea, its boundaries defined, clearly defined. The cleft of the day fully exposed, a panel of burgundy light along the horizon bright against the navy-blue sky.
2:00 a.m. Alone in the kitchen, maybe drinking ouzo. Being in a relationship, like travel, is a practice in bearing witness to a unique existence, a particular time and place on earth; paying attention to diurnal routines, culinary tastes, the garlic smell at the end of a hot day, what Tim looks like sitting in that chair, straight back, feet crossed, reading a book. A delight in his aliveness, in his beingness, as in that is the path we are walking, that is the sunset. He is my partner. He likes crepes and basketball and politics. And that moment of attention to him, to the sunsets, to the waters of the Aegean Sea put a small brake on my excessive individualism.
In the brief transcendence of self, the other is seen apart from, not a part of, the self; not through the self, not for the self. The *poke* pure delight of being with another.
~~~~~
When we land in Boston, it is past midnight and we have a two-hour drive home. We roll down the windows and open the sunroof, find a rock and roll station and sing ourselves awake. We get Bob Seeger and Led Zeppelin and more than we deserve. The June night is abundant in New England. Stars galore.
Mary Patrice Erdmans is a Professor of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University. Her essays have appeared in North American Review, Slow Trains, and Best Travel Writing. She has several award-winning books of nonfiction, including On Becoming a Teen Mom (Univ. California Press) and Opposite Poles (Penn State Press).
References:
Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. New York: The Free Press, 1989, p. 248.
22 December 2022
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