Sherry Chandler

“And now I suppose, boss, you think I’m going to start and tell you how many Turks’ heads I’ve lopped off, and how many of their ears I’ve pickled in spirits—that’s the custom in Crete. Well, I shan’t! I don’t like to, I’m ashamed. What sort of madness comes over us? . . . Today I’m a bit more level-headed and I ask myself: What sort of madness comes over us to make us throw ourselves on another man, when he’s done nothing to us, and bite him, cut his nose off, tear his ear out, run him through the guts—and all the time, calling on the Almighty to help us! Does it mean we want the Almighty to go and cut off noses and ears and rip people up?

“…When you’re an old gaffer with no teeth, it’s easy to say ‘Damn it boys, you mustn’t bite!’ But when you’ve got all thirty-two teeth . . . A man’s a savage beast when he’s young; yes, boss, a savage man-eating beast!

“There’s a sort of miracle happening here, boss. A funny sort of miracle which puzzles me. All that business—those lousy tricks, thefts, and that slaughter of ours—I mean of us rebels—all that brought Prince George* to Crete. Liberty!”

He looked at me with his eyes wide open in amazement.

“It’s a mystery,” he murmured, “a great mystery! So, if we want liberty in this bad world, we’ve got to have all those murders, all those lousy tricks, have we? I tell you, if I began to go over all the bloody villainy and all the murders we did, you’d have your hair stand on end. And yet, the result of all that, what’s it been? Liberty! Instead of wiping us out with a thunderbolt, God gives us liberty! I just don’t understand!”

—Nikos Kazantzakis, from Zorba the Greek (Simon and Schuster, 1953, trans. Carl Wildman), pp 21-22

* from Wikipedia:

Prince George of Greece and Denmark, known as Uncle Goggy to his family, (Greek: Πρίγκιπας Γεώργιος) (24 June 1869–25 November 1957) was the second son of King George I of Greece and Grand Duchess Olga. …He acted as high commissioner of Crete during its transition towards independence from Ottoman rule and union with Greece.

Although much of modern Greece had been independent since the 1820s, Crete remained in Ottoman hands. For the rest of the 19th Century, there had been many rebellions and protests on the island. A Greek force arrived to annex the island in 1897 and the Great Powers acted, occupying the island and dividing into British, French, Russian and Italian areas of control.

In 1898, Turkish troops were ejected and a national government was set up, still nominally under Ottoman suzerainty. Prince George, not yet thirty, was made High Commissioner and a joint Muslim-Christian assembly was part-elected, part-appointed

This befell and behappened and became and was, O, my Best Beloved, when the tame animals were wild. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild—as wild as could be—and they walked in the wet wild woods by their wild lones, but the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.

—Rudyard Kipling, from “The Cat That Walked By Himself,” text from Roger Caras’ Treasury of Great Cat Stories (Galahad Books, 1987)

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