"This idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity - has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michael Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Perigord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592."
- Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
"The essence of the heroic outlook is the pursuit of honour through action. The great man is he who, being endowed with superior qualities of body and mind, uses them to the utmost and wins the applause of his fellows because he spares no effort and shirks no risk in his desire to make the most of his gifts. His honour is the centre of his being, and any affront to it calls for immediate amends. By prowess and renown he gains an enlarged sense of personality and well-being; through them he has a second existence on the lips of men, which assures him that he has not failed in what matters most. This outlook runs through Greek history from Homer’s Achilles to the historical Alexander. It is countered and modified and altered, but it persists and even extends its field from an individual to a national outlook. It is a creed suited to men of action, and through it the Greeks justified their passionate desire to vary the pattern of their lives by resourceful and unflagging enterprise."
- C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience, (New York: Praeger, 1957), pp.20-21, 40-41.
This diarrhea of the spirit which takes place in front of an existential mirror is reflecting the plight of the modern Greek to a T: The world is based on chaos and I'm going to cross it without searching for logical order.
In the Greek Outlook we search for the elements which define Greekness in its humanistic, encompassing approach and seek to better ourselves through the pursuit of honor and truth -to the extend it's humanly possible of course.
