Dinner with Persephone Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lawson, who visited here around the turn of the century and wrote a book examining the survival of pre-Christian practices in the contemporary Greece he visited, a study which is also a travel book of great charm. Lawson’s book is in many ways as much an experience of traveling in an Edwardian gentleman’s England as it is of traveling in Greece, as all travel books are as much retracings as they are journeys forward, explorations too of the country left behind, which may be just as unknown as the territory ahead.
    I have a personal affection for Lawson, for his both sympathetic and independent imagination and his gently satirical turn of mind. I like him for confessing to seeing a nymph in an olive grove near Sparta: “Had I possessed an initial faith in the existence of nymphs and in the danger of looking upon them, so lifelike was the apparition that I might have sworn as firmly as did my guide that it was anymph we had seen, and might have required as strong a dose as he at the next inn to restore my nerves.” Later, on the island of Mitilini, I would hear an earthy Greek rhyme recorded by Lawson about a superstition of the bad effects Christian priests have on virility, warning that “if you see a priest on the road, hang on to your balls.” With endearing Edwardian discretion, Lawson had rendered it into Latin:
Si per viam sacerdoti occures, testiculos tuos teneto.
And I remember just now that Lawson had often seen advertisements in Athenian newspapers for new editions of some
Megas Oneirokritis
(Great Dream Interpreter), the same title as the book I had just bought. “In isolated homesteads,” he wrote, “to which the Bible has never found its way, I have several times seen a grimy tattered copy of such a book preserved among the most precious possessions of the family, and honored with a place on the shelf where stood the icon of the household’s patron-saint and whence hung his holy lamp.”
    I just have time to put down my shopping and run for the downtown trolley on the neighborhood’s main wide avenue, dodging the underworld of stray Athenian cats. A moving van is parked outside of one of the apartment buildings, stacks of cardboard containers resting on a dolly next to it, and two sweaty black-haired men approaching it carrying a dining table. The word “Metaphors” is painted on both its sides in brilliant blue. Here it means transportation. I will never be able to use the word again without the image of a meaning heaved onto the back like household furniture to be carried to its new residence.
    The trolley is of Russian manufacture and populated with women on their way to the city center for errands and shopping. It runs past the small neighborhood park, a glowing oasis that smells like a herbalist’s.
Drosia
, I heard someone murmur from a bench under one of the trees yesterday, the Greek word for dew, for freshness and cool, a word that like a trembling molecule is set into the Greek notion of erotic desire. It is extraordinary to realize out of what local materials and experiences large ideas are made—that the dream of a desired body, the imagination of an embrace is shaped here by thesearing merciless heat and stone that irritated Cicero; here the word freighted with the greatest weight of longing is
dipsa
, thirst, and in love poems lovers drink the dew from each other’s lips, and are refreshed in each other’s arms as if dew fell on them. I felt my whole body undertake the translation, yesterday, the new sense of what longing and desire might be, when I stood inside the park in a dense pool of wavering emerald shadows, where the darkness was not nocturnal but fertile. Leaving the street to find this was like kissing someone you have waited to kiss for a long time.
    Most of the ladies cross themselves three times as they pass a church, built in the cruciform Byzantine way, with a dome whose Pantokrator, the image of Christ the ruler of everything, can be imagined from outside without