Hyperion to Bellarmin
My island had grown too strait for me since Adamas’s leaving. I’d been bored in Tinos for years. I wanted to get out into the world.
‘Go first to Smyrna,’ said my father, ‘learn there the arts of seamanship and war, learn the speech of polished peoples, learn about their constitutions and opinions and manners and customs, prove all things and hold fast the best! — Then for my part go on as you will.’
‘Learn a little patience too,’ my mother added, and I accepted the advice and thanked her for it.
It’s rapturous to take the first step beyond the bounds of youth, and when I look back to my parting from Tinos, it’s like thinking of the day
of my birth. There was a new sun above me, and I relished land and sea and air as if for the first time.
The living activity with which I now pursued my education in Smyrna, and my rapid progress, did much to soothe my heart. And from this time I can recall many a blissful evening, my labours done. How often would I stroll beneath the evergreen trees on the banks of the Meles, by the birthplace of my Homer, and pick sacrificial flowers and cast them into the hallowed stream! Then in my peaceful dreams I trod the path to the nearby grotto where, they say, the venerable poet sang his Iliad. I found him. Every sound in me stilled before his presence. I opened his divine poem and it was as if I’d never known it, so wholly new the way it came alive in me now.
I also have fond memories of roaming through the country around Smyrna. It’s a glorious land, and a thousand times I’ve wished for wings to fly just once a year to Asia Minor.
From the plain of Sardis I made my way up through the crags of Tmolus.
I'd spent the night in a friendly hut at the mountain’s foot, amid myrtles, amidst the fragrance of the rockrose bush, with the swans playing beside me in the golden waters of the Pactolus, and an ancient temple of Cybele, like a bashful ghost, glancing out from between the elms into the bright moonlight. Five lovely pillars stood mourning over the rubble, and a regal portal lay toppled at their feet.
Now through a thousand blooming bushes my path grew upwards. From the craggy slope whispering trees bowed, showering their gossamer flakes on my head. I'd set out in the morning. By noon Id reached the crest of the range. I stood there, gladly gazing, relishing the purer airs of heaven. Those were blissful hours.
The land from which I'd climbed lay before me like a sea, youthful, full of living joy; it was with a heavenly unending play of colours that spring greeted my heart, and as the sun of heaven found itself again in the thousandfold changes of light given back to it by the earth, so my spirit knew itself in the fullness of life embracing it, besieging it from every side.
To the left the torrent, exulting like a giant, plunged down into the woods from the marble cliff that beetled above me, where the eagle played with its young and the snowy peaks glistened up into the blue
aether; to the right storm clouds came rolling over the forests of Mount Sipylus; I didn’t feel the gale that carried them, only the breath of a breeze in my hair, but I heard their thunder, as one hears the voice of the future, and I saw their flames like the distant light of dimly sensed divinity. I turned to the south and wandered on. There it lay open before me, the whole paradisal landscape through which the Cayster flows with many a charming wimple, as if it couldn’t linger long enough amidst all the affluence and loveliness surrounding it. Like the zephyrs my spirit fluttered blissfully from beauty to beauty, from the nameless peaceful hamlet, huddled deep below at the foot of the mountain, out to where the range of Messogis looms.
I returned to Smyrna like a drunk man from a banquet. My heart was too full of delights for me not to endow mortality with something of its surplus. I’d too happily absorbed as bounty nature’s beauty for me not to fill with it the gaps in human life. My shabby Smyrna was clothed in the colours of my inspiration and stood there like a bride. I found myself attracted by the sociable city-dwellers. The absurdity in their manners amused me like a child’s buffoonery, and since I was by nature beyond all their established forms and customs, I toyed with them all, donning and doffing them like carnival costumes.
But what really added spice for me to the vapid fare of everyday communion were those good faces and figures that merciful nature here and there still sends like stars into our darkness.
What hearty joy I took in them! how full of faith I read those friendly hieroglyphics! But it was much like my erstwhile experience with the birches in spring. I’d heard about the sap of these trees and had extravagant expectations of the delicious drink their lovely stems must yield. But it lacked both strength and spirit.
Alas! and how utterly hopeless was everything else I heard and saw.
Sometimes, when I went about among these polished people, it really seemed to me that human nature had broken down into so many species of beast. Here, as everywhere, it was the men who were especially degenerate and corrupt.
There are animals that howl when they hear music. But when talk turned to beauty of the spirit and youthfulness of heart, my more mannerly humans laughed. Wolves slink off when someone strikes a light. When these people saw a spark of reason they’d turn their backs like thieves.
When I spoke the odd warm word of ancient Greece, they yawned and opined, it was this day and age we had to live in; and another added weightily, good taste was still alive and well.
And sure enough, this was soon in evidence. One of them japed like a deckhand, the other puffed out his cheeks and spouted gobbets of wisdom.
Or there’d be one who’d act enlightened, snap his fingers at heaven and proclaim: he’d never worried about the birds in the bush, give him the bird in the hand anytime! Yet mention death to him and he would at once clasp his hands, and in the course of conversation observe that it’s a dangerous thing our priests now count for nothing.
The only ones I sometimes had a use for were the tellers of tales, the walking roll calls of foreign cities and countries, the talking peep boxes in which one can see spires and market places and potentates on chargers.
I finally grew weary of throwing myself away, looking for grapes in a desert and flowers on a field of ice.
I now lived more determinedly alone, and the gentle spirit of my youth had almost wholly vanished from my soul. The incurableness of the age had become plain to me from so much I tell and leave untold, and the beautiful consolation of finding my world in a single soul, embracing my kind in but one friendly figure, this too was denied me.
Dear friend! what were life without hope? A spark that leaps from the coal and perishes, and like a gust of wind heard in the dreary season, it soughs for a moment and then it’s gone — should we think that’s the way it is with us?
Even the swallow seeks friendlier climes in winter, the hart runs around in the heat of the day and its eyes seek streams of water. Who tells the infant its mother won’t withhold her breast? And look! it seeks it still.
Nothing could live if it had not hope. My heart now locked its treasures away, but only to keep them safe for better times, for the one, the holy, the true that at some period of existence should surely meet my thirsting soul.
How blissfully I’d often cling to it in hours of forefeeling when it gently played like moonlight around my soothed brow? Already then I knew you, already then you looked upon me like a spirit from the
clouds, you who’d one day rise for me, in the peacefulness of beauty, out of the dismal wave of the world! Now this heart would never more battle and burn.
As a lily sways in a silent breeze, so stirred my being in its element, in rapturous dreams of her.