The Return Begins

Photo by Youssef Mubarak on Unsplash

“As soon as we are born, the return begins.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

Not death. He doesn’t say death.

He says return.

And that single word changes everything. A return implies somewhere to go back to. It implies prior existence, belonging, a place that knows you. The traveller returns. The tide returns. The season returns.

The return is a homecoming.

Kazantzakis could have written it differently. He could have said: as soon as we are born, we begin to die. That would be true. Philosophers have been pondering that for centuries. Some with dread. Others with acceptance.

But Kazantzakis was interested in something else. Not fear. Not waiting. He was interested in life. And so he chose a word that does not extinguish it, and instead selected a word that encapsulates it — return. Go back to where you came from. It’s the obligation.

* * *

Greeks know a lot about journeying.

Odysseus doesn’t just sail home. He leaves Troy and begins the passage back.

The ten years of wandering after the epic battle are not an unfortunate delay between one life and another. They are the life. The Cyclops, the sirens, the seductions of Circe and Calypso, the descent into the underworld to speak with the dead. Those are not obstacles. They are passage. Odysseus returns to Ithaca not despite the journey but because of it, carrying everything the voyage made of him.

You cannot return to a place you have not fully left. You cannot come home if you have not first ventured all the way out into the dark.

* * *

The narrator watches through an open door.

He is lying on his mattress. Zorba is outside, crouching on a rock by the sea, like a night bird. I should fill my soul with flesh, he thinks. I should fill my flesh with soul. He envies Zorba with the envy of someone who has understood something too late, or perhaps just in time.

Then Zorba stands. Strips. Plunges into the sea.

By the pale light of the moon the narrator watches the great head appearing and disappearing. Zorba cries out. He barks. He whinnies. He crows like a cock. His soul finds an affinity with animals.

The narrator lies on his mattress and watches through the open door.

* * *

As soon as we are born, the return begins.

The purpose is to be alive to the journey. To be alive to it.

It began the moment we arrived.

Zorba is already in the water.