“If today I were to choose a spiritual guide from the whole wide world- a “guru” as they say in India, a venerable father as the monks say in Mount Athos-the one that I would choose without fail would be Zorba. He possessed precisely what a pen pusher needs for deliverance: the primitive glance that snatches nourishment lovingly from on high; the creative artlessness, renewed at each daybreak, that views everything unceasingly as though for the first time, bequeathing virginity to the everlasting quotidian elements of wind, sea, fire, woman and bread: the sureness of hand, the freshness of heart, the gallant steward’s ability to poke fun at his own soul for seeming to harbor a power higher than the soul; finally that wild, throaty laugh welling up from a source deeper than a man’s inner depths, a laugh that erupted redemptively at crucial moments from Zorba’s elderly chest, expanding with sufficient power to demolish (and did demolish) all the barricades-morality, religion, nationalism-erected around themselves by wretched, lily-livered humans to let them hobble securely through their diminished mini-lives. “
Nikos Kazantzakis “Zorba the Greek”, 1952
A Bird's Eye View of Fashion, Food, Travel, Culture, Beverage and Curiosity 