The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller

It's kind of funny that this is classified as non-fiction. It's obviously based on Henry Miller's real travel throughout Greece, but his descriptions are so exaggerated that I feel like it's got kind of a fictional spirit to it. (But I may just be thinking too much of the feel of In Search of Lost Time, which is more definitively a fictionalized narrative of Proust's life. But here, Henry Miller is really just writing about his direct experience and (apparently) not fabricating characters or details in general.)

I read this in preparation for my Greece 2026 trip -- see that note for details about how it connected to the trip.

I have some mixed feelings about the book -- some of it was slow-going. And there wasn't much of an overarching character journey or plot. But, again, it's a travelogue. And there kind of was discernable character change. At the start, Miller is clearly needing to be traveling and soaking in Greece, away from America, and is viewing America and his previous life there as near grotesque. By the end, he seems satisfied with his experience of Greece, and when he has to leave the country due essentially to his visa expiring (he can't convince the embassy that he needs to be there for his work (writing)), he doesn't really seem to mind returning to America. So there's growth there, or at least we see an internal change, which was rewarding to see.

What was more rewarding, though, was his message at the end. I really appreciated this. It tied together a lot of the book for me, and brought sense and purpose to the way the book was written. Boiled down, his message was that, even though many other people have visited Greece and seen the things he's seen, he had his own original experience of it, with weird little details which he's written about, resonating with his own life and thoughts. Sharing this unique experience with other people is inherently valuable.

At least, that's what I took away from these two passages (just a couple pages from the end of the book):

Standing in Agamemnon’s tomb I went through a veritable re-birth. I don’t mind in the least what people think or say when they read such a statement. I have no desire to convert anyone to my way of thinking. I know now that any influence I may have upon the world will be a result of the example I set and not because of my words. I give this record of my journey not as a contribution to human knowledge, because my knowledge is small and of little account, but as a contribution to human experience. Errors of one sort and another there undoubtedly are in this account but the truth is that something happened to me and that I have given as truthfully as I know how.

During the time I knew him Katsimbalis’ life was relatively quiet and unadventurous. But the most trivial incident, if it happened to Katsimbalis, had a way of blossoming into a great event. It might be nothing more than that he had picked a flower by the roadside on his way home. But when he had done with the story that flower, humble though it might be, would become the most wonderful flower that ever a man had picked. That flower would remain in the memory of the listener as the flower which Katsimbalis had picked; it would become unique, not because there was anything in the least extraordinary about it, but because Katsimbalis had immortalized it by noticing it, because he had put into that flower all that he thought and felt about flowers, which is like saying—a universe.

The second passage above also really resonates with me. I love the idea that you can take something that seems so simple, and infuse and inflate it with your own experience of it, and share it with others. Immediately upon reading this, I connected it to the value of storytelling and writing. This feels like the main takeaway from the book that I will carry forward with me, especially when thinking about my own writing and maintaining this digital garden.