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Today’s column marks the end of our daily encounters. No one’s forced my hand—this is a choice, a deliberate retreat into silence after 35 years in print, first at Alitheia and then here at the Phileleftheros group.
To share a piece of yourself every single day, year after year—your views, how you see the world, what moves you, what brings you joy, what makes you angry—is an expenditure that becomes nearly unbearable. Odysseus Elytis put it better in his poem “Maria Nephele”: “You see, weapons are needed to speak for our chaotic times/and we must keep in line too with the so-called ‘national ideals’/Why stare at me, scribe, you who never put on a soldier’s uniform,/the art of making money is a military trait, too/You may spend sleepless nights – writing thousands of sad lines/or covering the walls with revolutionary slogans/Other people will always see you as an intellectual,/and only I, who love you: as a captive of my dreams.”
So there it is: writing, too, is a martial quality. Especially in our times, when public discourse has taken on entirely different dimensions.
This year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai, presents in his book “The Melancholy of Resistance” a protagonist who retreats to his home, far from worldly concerns. He boards up his windows not to condemn himself to isolation, but to grant himself the saving grace of inner thought and doubt. Shut away, he concentrates on what he calls his “strategic withdrawal in the face of the pathetic stupidity” of humanity, with the sole purpose of redefining the fundamental principles of existence.
What I’m after, at this stage of my life, at 61, is precisely that. The simple happiness of tranquillity. People ask what I’ll do, what my plan is, and the truth is I haven’t got one. Lately, though, with increasing frequency, I catch myself not wanting to say anything at all. Spotting all manner of issues that under different circumstances would merit commentary, but having no desire to engage. Whether from a sense of futility, or even indifference.
But because, as Elytis also says in the same poem, “My one hand crumples the money and the other smoothes it over”, for a little while yet the column will continue to exist every Sunday in the cultural section of Phileleftheros, which tomorrow marks 70 years in the public life of this place.
This article was first published on 06.12.2025
Source: AN OWED FAREWELL
