From Sailing to Byzantium

By Leah Napolin

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The next morning we join thousands of others climbing the Acropolis to the Parthenon.  The way is steep, yet throughout the surrounding throng there are the lame, the blind and the halt making the ascent with us.  One hears the babble of tongues, feels the press of flesh. We are worshippers on a cultural pilgrimage, but it feels more like a religious one.  Tour guides carry umbrellas of many colors to identify themselves to their followers, and the umbrellas bob ahead in our field of vision as we wind along the pipe scaffolding that sheaths the major ruins under reconstruction.  Perhaps there is order in the chaos though it’s not always discernible. The stones of the Acropolis don’t offer a secure foothold to anyone, and the last steps to the top are so crowded with people that every few feet the procession halts.  

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How different this is from Barbara’s visit thirty years ago.  Then, she and her traveling companion were able to climb the Acropolis and lunch on the temple steps; later, spend an enchanted night under the stars at a smaller temple on the isle of Delphi, the navel of the earth.  No longer possible. We have overpopulated the world.

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Ah, we’re finally here.  The September sun beats down on us.  Athens shimmers in the distance like a mirage.  To think about the feet that have trod this ground for millennia is enough to make me dizzy.  I hear the murmur of cicadas, but it’s only the click of camera shutters.

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On the descent I glimpse my shadow on the side of a fluted pillar and stop to capture it in my camera lens.  Featureless, hat on head. Not a conventional pose, but somehow this strikes me as more appropriate, more satisfying.  Even in life we are shadows prefiguring our leap into the unknown.

The metaphor of life is:  you arrive, then you depart.  The metaphor of the ship is: you depart, then you arrive.  Later that day, leaving Athens from the port of Piraeus, we’re standing on the top forward deck.  The ship’s horn sounds, the engines throb to life and we slip out of the mooring. There is something both euphoric and unutterably sad about departures.  Once, I watched as an ocean liner pulled out of its berth in my hometown of New York, people jammed rows deep at the railings of the ship, waving goodbye to the others around me standing below on the dock, waving back.  As for myself, I wasn’t going anywhere that day. I was neither arriving or departing, but both times I wept anyway.

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There is something moving about arrivals, too.  Newsreels of troop ships returning home from countless wars come to mind.  The joyful reunions of husband and wife, parent and child, move me to tears.  I can understand tears when we’re grieving or sad, but why do we cry when we’re happy?    

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I thought back to when I was 23 and a bride.  We’d booked passage on the Queen Mary for a year abroad.  Our families joined us in our stateroom before sailing. There were flowers, a fruit basket.  We toasted from a bottle of champagne. Then, from the public address system came the announcement  “All ashore that’s going ashore!” After hugs and kisses we went our separate ways, our families to the dock below, Bert and I to a spot at the railing.  There I was, in the flower of my youth, sailing with a young man I admired and loved to a year of experience at the beginning of our grown-up lives, what was to be a glorious new life.  Yet, as the ship slipped slowly away from my loved ones on the dock—or was it them slipping slowly away from me?—I couldn’t help myself. The tears flowed.

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Now, leaving Piraeus, not with Bert but with Barbara, my partner of twenty years, with no one waving goodbye—my mother and father and aunts and uncles long dead, my sister and children and grandchildren far away on another continent—the tears flow again.  I’m 72 years old and the moment of departure is both heartbreakingly sad and joyous. As city and bright shoreline recede in the distance, swallowed up in the turbines’ wake that churns behind us, past and present merge into a continuum where time has no meaning.