Prospero's Cell A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfù - Lawrence Durrell

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Climb to Vigla in the time of cherries and look down. You will see that the island lies against the mainland roughly in the form of a sickle. On the landward side you have a great bay, noble and serene and almost completely landlocked. Northward the tip of the sickle almost touches Albania and here the troubled blue of the Ionian is sucked harshly between ribs of limestone and spits of sand. ..."


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... It was on a ringing spring day that we discover the house. The sky lay in a heroic blu arc as we came down the stone ladder....You will think it strange to have come all the way from England to this fine Greece promontory where our only company can be rock, air, sky - and all the elementals. ... There is no explanation. It is enough to record that everything is exactly as the fortune-teller said it would be. White house, white rock, friends, and a narrow style of loving; and perhaps a book which will grow out of these scraps as from the rubbish of these old Venetian tombs the cypress cracks the slabs at last and rises up fresh and green."

These words are part of the opening pages of Lawrence Durrell’s book Prospero’s Cell, A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfù. Fascinated by the Ionian island where he had settled in 1935 with his wife Nancy and his family, Lawrence Durrell wrote its history just in 1945. By that time, he lived in Alexandria, Egypt, after his escape from Greece during the Second World War. 

Durrell gives a lyric and evocative portrait of the island that accomodated Ulysses and inspired Shakespeare, in Durrell's words "an ante-room to Aegean Greece." He combines entries from his journal, dated from April 1937 to January 1941, to fragments of the history of the island, its characters, landscapes, and anecdotes. Year after year, season after season, the young man firmly determined to become a famous writer lived and absorbed the island. When it came to write about it, his experience could no longer be separated by the history of Corfù. The freedom of those years, the colours of the landscapes, the people he had met, the stories he had learnt had changed his words and life forever. 

Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself.


Further reading:

Prospero's Cell A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfù, Lawrence Durrell, London, Faber and Faber, 1945.

Photos:
TravelinaGarden.