Field Notes

News from The Village is a valediction to youth and to Greece. Early in the 1980s David Mason spent five months in Kalamitsi, a village in the Pelo-ponnese. Mason is a dreamer and, like most dreamers, a loner. Dreams are comparatively solitary places, their landscapes populated by the self and its imagined identities. When other people appear and meander through a person’s dream, they often resemble a corps de ballet, strikingly present for moments but not on stage for long. Mason left home at eighteen. Afterward he worked in Alaska, then in upstate New York. In 1980 he and his wife pooled their savings and almost on a lark went to Greece. For the dreamer memory is lotus land, and in News blossoms are honeyed, and tables, richly simple, are set with retsina, olives, and bread hot from the village baker. Easy friendships seasoned Mason’s experiences. Friendships were uncomplicated because Mason had little money. He had not aged into wary middle life when financial concerns tarnish the imagination and calculations undermine spontaneity.

In Kalamitsi Mason planted a vegetable garden. He received advice from a man whose wife worked for Patrick Leigh Fermor. As a result he became friends with Fermor and through Fermor met Bruce Chatwin and other writers. Fermor, who died this past spring, lived beyond personality into legend. His exploits in Crete in World War ii, his setting out to walk across Europe in 1933, and his travel books, especially Mani; describing his wanderings in the Peloponnese—became the matter of books and films. Fermor made and kept friends easily, and for decades serious travelers to Greece visited him. For years he was the subject of the wistful conversations of people who imagined roaming so far from their ordinary lives that they became characters from their own dreams.

Mason was not a simple youthful tourist. He learned Greek and delved into village life. The News is always thoughtful and never sensational. Mason writes brightly, for example, about the “desire of human beings to see what few others have seen.” Only youth, of course, is capable of such vision. Time and the accompanying experiences of years shape the comparative and diminishing mind. Wordsworth’s euphoric “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” captures Mason’s contagious joy. At the end of five months Mason leaves Greece. Nineteen years later he returns on a Fulbright with a different wife. The splendor has not vanished from the rocky landscape, but Mason is older. Getting, spending, and politics taint this later sojourn. Former acquaintances do not remember Mason, and he himself has grown more critical. Mason remains thought-provoking, however. “Why do we like to pause at the graves of writers we have loved, whether we knew them or not?” he asks. People genuflect at the graves of writers because in doing so they visit their pasts. At the graves they recall books that once were touchstones of the lives they have lost to time. I cannot read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage now. If I did, remembrances of things I wanted to do but never did would sadden me. On the other hand perhaps recalling the boy who escaped the “loops” of place and held the hand of the dying gladiator would be a lotus moment, a narcotic soothing the present.

Until recently Greek myths figured significantly in the educated wasp-ocracy’s learning. The isles of Greece...