Past Perfect: The Omphalos and the Oracle

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“You have two birth-places,” wrote the 20th-century novelist Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990), “the place where you were really born and … a place of predilection where you really wake up to reality.” Really born to Anglo-Irish parents in India, Durrell was shipped off to school in England. Unable to adjust to the regimentation of formal education, he attended one school after another before eventually failing his university entrance exams. Armed with a small inheritance from his father, he began playing jazz piano in a London nightclub and writing novels. In 1935 he pulled up stakes and moved to the island of Corfu, where, dazzled by Greece’s dancing sunlight and flowing wine, he wrote his first successful novel, The Black Book (1938), with the encouragement of his friend and fellow writer Henry Miller. (In the selection that follows, from a 1965 essay called “Delphi,” Durrell muses about Greek sites he visited during this period.) When the Nazis invaded Greece in 1941, he fled to Alexandria, Egypt, where he wrote a humor column for a newspaper and served as press attaché with the British embassy. In Alexandria, he met the woman who eventually became his second wife—the seductive Eve “Gypsy” Cohen, the inspiration for Justine, the protagonist of the first part of his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet. Published between 1957 and 1960, these four novels capture Alexandria’s unique mixture of decadent voluptuousness and primitive energy, a kind of odd counterpointing that fascinated the novelist. In the 1950s and 1960s, Durrell variously settled in Rhodes, Argentina, Yugoslavia and Cyprus, which he fled following the Turkish invasion in 1974. He then moved to the south of France, his last “place of predilection.”

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To wander across this country of stone fables, shattered mythologies, blunted statues which have been passed (like wax in a flame) across the sun’s burning-glass can be both frightening as well as inspiring. How different from Italy, where the beauty comes out of domestication—the touch of the wise human hand is everywhere. Everything has a history, can be traced, decoded, understood. But Greece … everything is confused, piled on top of itself, contorted, burnt dry, exploded; and the tentativeness of the scholar’s ascriptions is a heartbreak. It is as if nothing were provable any more, everything has become shadowy, provisional …

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Yet if this disappointment persists for the traveller today there is something more certain upon which he can base himself; the landscape remains as unchanging, uncompromising, ravishingly pure and vertical. And each of the ancient sites has its own flavour—expressed from the very ground, it seems. I use the word ‘express’ since it suggests also the extraction of precious oils from a fruit like the olive. The rareness of Greece lies in this singular purity of landscape-awareness; the historic memories echo on, drone like the bees that once droned in the tomb of Agamemnon …

Among these ancient sites Delphi is the most grandiose, as well as the most sphingine; the long winding roads leading away north from Livadia coil like the sacred serpent. The landscape, curled inwards upon itself, reveals itself only in snatches; the mountain ranges come up and recede, recline and rise up. It is almost as if the dose had been one measured by the ancient physicians who built this road towards the centre of the earth—towards that mysterious omphalos which I first found as a boy, lying in an open field above the road. I still have an impertinent picture of myself, leaning negligently against it as if at a bar … But among so many visits to Delphi I have never found the slightest variation in the impression it makes on me; the latest was last year after an absence from Greece of nearly twenty years. What is this strange impression? As I have said, each site in Greece has its singular emanation: Mycenae, for example, is ominous and grim—like the castle where Macbeth is laid. It is a place of tragedy, and blood. One doesn’t get this from its history and myths—they merely confirm one’s sensation of physical unease. Watch the people walking around the site. They are afraid that the slightest slip and they may all fall into a hole in the ground, and break a leg. It is a place of rich transgressions, tears, and insanity. A few miles away lies dream-saturated Epidaurus, so lax and so quiet; one would not dare to be ill for long if one lived there. Its innocence is provoking. But Delphi … The heart rises as the road rises and as the great scarps of mountain rise on either side; the air becomes chill. Finally, round the last corner, there she is in her eyrie like a golden eagle, her claws clamped around the blood-colored rock which falls away with vertiginous certainty to the dry bed of the Pleistos. The long thrilling sweep of the olive groves—greener than anywhere in Greece—is like the sudden sweep of strings in some great symphony. And then the ribbon of sea, the small port; for once the sea seems diminished. Behind one the rock climbs, the 041paths climb, the trees climb with one, until all is bare rock and blueness once again. Up there an eagle flies—one thinks of Zeus! But the atmosphere is so pure that one can hear the stroke of his great wings as he frays the air. A slight wheezy creaking, like a man rowing across water …

The place … is built upon two enigmas and neither of them is easily decipherable—the omphalos and the oracle. In an age looking for both physical and intellectual points of reference these two symbols stand for something important, even momentous. Somehow in Delphi while one is uneasy it is not with a sense of fear so much as a sense of premonition; what is here, one feels, is intact in its purity. The force is still there buried in the rocky cliffs. It could speak if it wished and overturn everything with one reverberating statement—but of course one of those statements curled up in a double negative. Is not Truth two-sided? Walking about the hillside in the shadow of the pines, listening to the gentle creaking of the wind and the pleasant susurrus of the cicadas, one has sudden moments of panic. Perhaps this is the moment—perhaps today the oracle is due to make its re-entry into the world. If it did, if from the heart of the rock we heard one of those terrific and yet ordinary judgements upon the world of affairs, would we be ready to receive it, act upon it?

“You have two birth-places,” wrote the 20th-century novelist Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990), “the place where you were really born and … a place of predilection where you really wake up to reality.” Really born to Anglo-Irish parents in India, Durrell was shipped off to school in England. Unable to adjust to the regimentation of formal education, he attended one school after another before eventually failing his university entrance exams. Armed with a small inheritance from his father, he began playing jazz piano in a London nightclub and writing novels. In 1935 he pulled up stakes and moved to the island […]