For some weeks, writing this blog has steered me into
remembrances of times long past. I
guess that's what happens when old geezers get even older—they frequently fall
into sepia-toned memories, if they are lucky enough to have memories at
all.
For example, while writing in [1] about
heirloom fruits and vegetables, I found myself in a sentimental reverie about
picking wild berries in a summer camp I went to in the 1930s—and wrote about
that in [2]. Again, when pondering last week the transition
from mythology to historicity in [3],
I was nostalgically transported back to the summer of 1962, leading me to
describe my stunning experience when I came upon the palace of Agamemnon, where
mythology and history intersect.
In turn, describing that brush with antiquity reminded me of a mystical contact I
had the same summer with Pan, the ancient Greek god of the wild, of shepherds
and of rustic music. Here's how it
happened.
For the first time, that summer over fifty years ago, I had
both the opportunity and money to travel widely, without any immediate
objective. I was at the beginning
of my professorial career at UC Berkeley and still a bachelor—I hadn't yet met
Helen. Since I was to attend a
technical conference in Brussels at the end of the summer, I decided to roam Europe
and the Near East for two months before it, with no particular itinerary in
mind.
I started in Paris, wanting to renew my two brief stops there ten years previously, en route to and
from a summer job in Britain [4]. From Paris, I wandered by car
south-easterly in France almost at random, stopping where the spirit took
me. One of those places was
Annecy, where I won about $500 at a casino. Flush with that windfall, I headed to the Côte d'Azur, where
I parted with much of my loot by staying at the Hotel Negresco in Nice, a Belle
Époque watering spot that was then still singular in its luxury.
After that touch of indolence, I resumed wandering, crossing
northern Italy to Venice, then taking a boat down the Adriatic and through the
Corinth Canal to Piraeus, the port of Athens. The smog and bustle of Athens offended me, so I struck out
by car for the Peleponnesus, where I had the startling encounter with the ghost
of Agamemnon mentioned above. Now
besotted with antiquity, I decided to go to Rhodes, an island in the Aegean
just off the coast of Turkey where most of the cultures of the ancient world
intersected. It is filled with
relics of successive invaders, and once was the site of the Colossus, a
100-foot-tall bronze statue that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient
world until it was destroyed by an earthquake in the third century BCE.
The pull of antiquity led me to drive to the ancient acropolis at
Lindos, taking me across a good part of the island. It was a very hot day, so I stopped at an isolated, rustic
taverna to have a bite to eat and a carafe of wine. That's when it happened. After eating, I lay down
under a tree for a brief doze before driving on. The combination of the wine and the sun flashing on the
fluttering leaves above me must have been hypnotic, for I went into an
other-worldly state. I will swear
to this day that I heard the pipes of Pan; I could almost see him. For the only time in my life I
completely knew—at the level of my soul, not in some intellectual
rationalization—what it felt like to be possessed by a god. I understood why the ancients invented
so many gods to enrich their existence.
It was mind-bending.
That all seems so silly and
romantic now, a half century later, that I hesitate to write about it. Yet it happened, and it brought me
infinitely closer to the antiquity on which I was feasting. I might even say that it is the one
truly religious experience I've ever had, although in retrospect I suppose that
it was merely psychedelic. The
rest of my summer—further eastward to Israel and then a return to Western
Europe and my conference—was anticlimactic.