Report to Greeco | Nikos Kazantzakis

My report to Ghrico is not a autobiography. My personal life has some value, and quite relative, to me and not to anyone else. The only value I know in it was in the efforts to rise from one level to another to reach the highest point that her strength and stubbornness can take her; the summit I named arbitrarily "The Cretan Outlook." There were four decisive levels in my ascent. Each bearing a sacred name: Christ, Buddha, Lenin, Ulysses. And my bloody journey between each of these great spirits and other spirits is what I will try hard to clarify in these diaries, after the sun has almost set. It is a journey of a human carrying his heart in his mouth as he climbs the mountain of his harsh and tough destiny. All my spirits are a cry. And all my actions are a response to this cry. Throughout my life, there was a word that tormented me and renewed me, and that was the word "ascension." And I will present this ascent. I mix here reality with imagination, with the traces of the red footsteps I left behind as I ascended. And I am eager to finish quickly before I wear my "black helmet," and return to the dust. Because this bloody trace is the only mark that will remain of my crossing to the earth. Everything I wrote or did was written or achieved on water, and has faded away.