The rocky garden

The novelist and Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis is well known, he is the author of the novel "Zorba" known in all languages, and "Report to Greco", and "Christ Recrucified", but "The Rock Garden" is a different book from his other works, because it is a book of journeys, a trip into worlds that were new at the time for Japan, and this journey aims at liberation and salvation through understanding and embodying another culture, this is what the author himself says in the book: like an old priest who leaves his children and grandchildren and disappears into the forest, Kiryana resorts to solitude under the mercy of the desire for transparent wings, I disappeared in Japan. It was a critical period in my life, characterized by vague and deep anxiety, by a changing disease about to happen. I was suffocating—and among women, ideas, political work, and travel...—I chose travel as a way to salvation. I have been thirsty, since my birth, for the abyss, for destruction, for a drop of deadly Eastern poison, and I finally decided to cure myself of longing. How? By burying myself deep in that harmful East, filling my eyes with all the smiles similar to Buddha’s smile that hypnotically lull hope and kill it on the ground. My long journey aimed to unify the diverse secret voices that surge from deep inside me, and to reveal the unmanageable catastrophe of all human effort, to give shape to blindness, to discover the laws of this chaos, and to impose order on my chaotic desires.