Mary Norris's “Greek to Me” is one of the most satisfying accounts of a great passion that I have ever read. It traces a decades-long obsession with Greece: its language (both modern and ancient), literature, mythologies, people, places, food and monuments — all with an absorption that never falters and never squanders the reader's attention.
Norris is the famous New Yorker copy editor who wrote “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” a few years ago. That book — a record of her equally passionate relationship with punctuation — gave us a rich example of her noble predilection for knowing everything there is to know about a single subject. If Isaiah Berlin were alive today and able to read “Between You & Me,” I am certain he would have considered Norris a perfect candidate for inclusion in the category of hedgehog, his term for a person who works to know one thing completely, as opposed to the fox, who pursues many things superficially.
Over a period of nearly 40 years, which has included countless trips to Greece, Norris's experience of the country and all things Greek has remained ever fresh: Very nearly she believes it her destiny. In an oddly brooding way, it's almost as though she thinks Greece has been there from the time she was young to rescue her from herself.
When Norris was a baby in Cleveland, a 2-year-old sibling died, and she grew up feeling irrationally guilty about that death. One of her most significant memories is of a college course in Greek mythology that somehow released her from this anxiety, providing her with the wherewithal to leave “girlhood for the life of a woman.” This longing for the magic of the ancient world repeated itself years later when, while taking a course in Greek tragedy at Columbia, she became convinced that whatever she read in that class “would put my own troubles in perspective.” At the end of her book, Norris visits the famous Dafni Monastery, which contains a particularly great Christ mosaic. If ever there was a moment when her infatuation with Greece and all things Greek seems to climax, this is it. The effect on her of that mosaic was almost miraculous. “My gratitude has made me easier to get along with ever since,” she writes.
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