Patrick Leigh Fermor on the Mani Peninsula
No one sang Greece more profoundly than Fermor, and no one tried more ardently to argue its core importance to Western culture, both now and—a more radical argument—in the future. Roumeli and Mani are his twin love songs to Greece, but it is in Mani that he most eloquently lamented the disappearance of folk cultures under the mindless onslaught of modernity and celebrated most beautifully what he thought of as an immortal landscape in which human beings naturally found themselves humanized. Consider his illustration of the Greek sky that always seemed to hang so transparently above his own house: ‘A sky which is higher and lighter and which surrounds one closer and stretches further into space than anywhere else in the world. It is neither daunting nor belittling but hospitable and welcoming to man and as much his element as the earth; as though a mere error in gravity pins him to the rocks or the ship’s deck and prevents him from being assumed into infinity.’
—Wall Street Journal Magazine has a feature article on Patrick Leigh Fermor and his relationship with Greece in its current issue. Mani and Roumeli, Leigh Fermor’s books about Greece, of course come in for serious discussion, as does In Tearing Haste, a collection of letters between Leigh Fermor and Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire and junior ‘Mitford Girl.’
