Questioning The Rules Of Life And Poverty

10 Pages 2513 Words

st nature. He asks readers if following other’s rules or forcing yourself to conform to things will really, truly change desires inherent in you,
I could clearly feel the two great torrents struggling withing me: The one pushes toward harmony, patience, and gentleness. It functions with ease, without effort, following the natural order of things. You throw up a stone up high and for a second you force it up against its will; but quickly it joyfully falls again. You toss a thought in the air but the thought quickly tires, it becomes impatient in the empty air and falls back to earth and settles with the soil. The other force is, it would seem, contrary to nature. An unbelievable absurdity. It wants to conquer weight, abolish sleep, and, with the lash, prod the universe upward. (Kazantzakis 339-440)
He is using gravity to compare stones and thoughts. When you throw a stone in the air, you force it to do something against it’s inherent abilities, however because of gravity and nature it will quickly fall back down to earth. Thoughts are also like this in the sense that following rules or forcing your thoughts against their will does not change their original nature or tendencies. If thoughts or inherent wills did change by forcing them into rules this would be, “...contrary to nature. An unbelievable absurdity” (Kazantzakis 440). He is comparing a patient conforming will versus a will that does exactly what it wants and offering readers the notion that they decide for themselves which will to follow. This is what Kazantzakis is thinking about on his way to Paphos, the place of origin for Aphrodite.
He greets a young girl and asks if Paphos is far. Due to the girl’s confusion an old woman interrupts and tells him where to go. The place is now called Kouklia because of the little clay women buried there. Kazantzakis and the old woman have a conversation about these dolls and why people dig them up, “‘And what do they do ...