Why I’ll never forget the holiday I didn’t go on.
A story about an angel, a two-faced Greek island, and the value of lists.
The island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf—forty minutes from Piraeus by high-speed ferry—is two-faced, like most Greek islands. On the west side is the old port with its decorous, low-rise, pale-awninged kafenia lining the shore. On the east side is the touristic center of Agia Marina with its loud hotels and parasoled beaches. Different worlds that rarely meet.
I used to spend summers on the west side of the island and when I think of Aegina now, it’s memories of driving up mountain roads in a car borrowed from my in-laws, of swimming at Marathonas, where the sand is—or at least, used to be—rimmed by cicada-thundering acacia trees. It’s the pistachio harvest that begins in August. And encounters with writers, filmmakers, and artists who I admired: the poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke at a taverna one night, watching a movie in an open-air cinema with the film director Nikos Koundouros (improbably, it was Sandra Bullock in The Net), or talking with the painter Yannis Moralis in his studio.
But above all, Aegina will always be the memory of a holiday that I never went on.
It was June 1976, two years after the Junta had fallen, that my parents visited Athens for work, taking my elder brother Daniel with them. When the medical conference they were attending was over, they got on a ferry at Piraeus and spent the day in Aegina—on the other, touristic side of the island. Walking along the beach, they struck up a conversation with an elderly man who treated them to a fresh fish lunch at a beachside taverna. They sat there until sunset, under a pine tree by the sparkling sea drinking retsina from a copper jug. And at the end, after Angelos had paid for it, he asked for their address, and they swore undying friendship.
My parents went back to London. Months passed and then, just before Christmas, an enveloped arrived with a Greek stamp on it. It was a card from Angelos.
Sometime after that, my father returned to Athens. During a break in his work schedule, he took a boat to Aegina in the hope of meeting Angelos. And there he was, sitting at the same spot, under the same tree, on the same chair. His face nut-brown and carefully creased, his white shirt buttoned to the neck under his dark jacket, like a prize-wining portrait in the National Geographic. “Angelos!” my father called, “How are you?”
Angelos smiled quizzically. “Hold on,” he said, and getting up, went inside his whitewashed cottage, emerging a moment later with a hefty ledger. “What’s your name?” he asked. My father told him, and the old man slid his worn finger down the long list of names inside—pages and pages of names from Germany, Sweden, Holland, France, and Britain. “Ah,” he said at last, beaming at my father. “Yes, here you are.”
When my father told me the story, some years later, it upset me because it felt like a betrayal. A dream of authenticity had been shattered; the idea that somewhere, someone was living a real life and through some connection to them we could live it too. But my father enjoyed the story. Far from disillusioning him, it gave him hope.
For a long time I was baffled by his reaction. But now, as I discover the many lists that he left behind in diaries and notebooks, and on scraps of paper, I begin to see their poetry, too. Here is a life in lists of words and thoughts, book titles, names, dates, passwords, telephone numbers, email addresses, and medication. Lists in the form of annotated thumbnail sketches were often the starting point for his art, memoranda to himself that he’d build upon and assimilate in paintings and collages. All of which brings to mind a 2010 exhibition entitled ‘Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations,’ which showcased lists from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Among them, a grocery list with the word ‘banana’ misspelt, which was discovered in the pocket of a coat belonging to the abstract expressionist painter Franz Kline, scribbled on the back of an invitation to a 1962 “symposium of provocative visual material” at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
Umberto Eco has written about “the vertigo of lists” and the urge, at least in Western culture, for cataloguing warriors, biblical progenitors, saints, flora and fauna, and art. Among the many lists he discusses in his book The Infinity of Lists is Hesiod’s exhaustive genealogy of the gods in his poem The Theogony and the sixteenth-century French satirical writer François Rabelais’s catalogue of ass-wiping methods from the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. “The list is the origin of culture,” Eco told the German news magazine Der Spiegel. “Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists.”
The Greek poet George Seferis took the name Asine, mentioned in the 266-line catalogue of ships in Book II of the Iliad—one of the most famous of literary lists—as the starting point for his poem The King of Asine (1940):
unknown, forgotten by all, even by Homer, only one word in the Iliad and that uncertain, thrown here like the gold burial mask.
As John Burnside reminds us in his commentary on the list of plants in Marianne Moore’s magnificent poem ‘The Steeple-Jack’ (1932), there is an etymological connection between ‘inventory’ and ‘invention’ (from the Latin invenire, to discover). Lists don’t have to reflect a stifling seriality, but placement in a list can create new relations, and induce new ways of looking at the world:
the trumpet-vine, fox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has spots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds, or moon-vines trained on fishing twine at the back door; cat-tails, flags, blueberries and spiderwort, striped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies — yellow and crab-clad ragged sailors with green bracts — toad-plant, petunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue ones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas.
Lists are always ambiguous or contradictory. They can be oppressive instruments used for violent accumulation, or they can be tools for liberation. Inclusion on a list can mean death or salvation, exclusion or inclusion, despair or hope. As a cancer physician, my father knew the potency of lists—the intuitive totting up of therapeutic pros and cons; of those who get to live and those who don’t. And that encounter on Aegina reminded him, I think, of the affirmative power that lists can have. Angelos, he used to say, is the Greek word for ‘messenger,’ the origin of the English word ‘angel.’ And he savored the fact that he’d met his angel among the sunburned beach bums in Agia Marina, not the art aficionados on the right side of the island.