There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there is nothing left to do, and nothing else to pursue.
Ghost Dog
Book review: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.
(Hat tip to Devon Devereaux for the photo)
This is not so much a ‘how to’ book – ‘I selected the above title, quite obviously, for its shock value,’ notes Bradbury with characteristic candidness – as it is a book of musings about what it means to write and be a writer from the author of, most famously, Fahrenheit 451.
It collects a number of Bradbury’s essays and poems written over a period of 30 years and touches on why he became a writer, where he finds his ideas, the process of writing some of his books and, more generally, the joys of writing.
And that’s what’s so refreshing – his playful and boisterous approach. He writes about the pleasures of writing, rather than treating it like a hard slog, and he never takes himself too seriously:
Hot today, cool tomorrow. This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water on the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today – explode – fly apart – disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?
But that’s not to say he doesn’t have some wise words. Quite the opposite. The above quotation shows you don’t have to be entirely serious to offer good writing advice.
Here’s a selection of his best bits.
The last couple of quotations betray the main inspiration of the book: German professor Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, which was responsible for bringing Zen to Europe after World War II.
The chief lesson in both books is that if you practise something enough it becomes effortless and unconscious; you enter a flow state.
You need to go to Zen for the answer to your problems. Zen, like all philosophies, followed but in the tracks of men who learned from instinct what was good for them. Every wood-turner, every sculptor worth his marble, and ballerina, practices what Zen preaches without having heard the word in all their lives.
If you like Ray Bradbury’s writing and you’re looking to be inspired, this makes for an excellent read. He writes with an infectious energy that you can’t help but catch, which is a welcome change from the grave tone of many ‘how to’ writing books.
Today (18th Feb 1883) it’s Nikos Kazantzakis’s birthday!!! Love his book ‚Zorba the Greek‘, beginning with these words: ‚I first met him in Piraeus….‘
I’d heard of Zorba the Greek, in the way that the classics of modern literature totter into the subconscious even without being read or studied. It was only while holidaying in Greece in summer 2010 that I bought a tatty, overpriced Faber edition from a small bookshop in Athens as I waited for the boat to Heraklion, the main port of Crete where Nikos Kazantzakis, the book’s author, was born and is buried.
The novel tells the story of the narrator’s friendship with a lively 60ish-year-old lover, fighter, adventurer, musician, chef, miner, storyteller, dancer … the occupations are endless. This is Zorba, described by the narrator as „the man I had sought so long in vain“. They spend a year on Crete together, Zorba managing the lignite mine that the narrator is financing as a project to bring him into closer contact with working-class men, whose honest, simple lifestyles the narrator admires but cannot emulate. It is a tale of Zorba’s seductions, most memorably of Madame Hortense, the heavily made-up, big-buttocked, ageing courtesan who offers the two men hospitality and a little more, and of the narrator’s melancholy „life-and-death struggle“ to write an account of his Buddha while waiting for Zorba to return from the mine and make his supper.
Zorba the Greek is rich in the sights, sounds and smells – wild sage, mint and thyme, the orange-blossom scent worn by Madame Hortense, the citrus and almond trees – of life on Crete: the rabbits eaten, the sea that both men plunge into, the wine drunk. The lament of the santuri (the musical instrument Zorba carries with him everywhere and cares for like a child) provides the background accompaniment to their adventures. The novel was aptly described by Time Magazine in its 1953 review as „nearly plotless but never pointless“.
Even though it opens in a cafe with fishermen sheltering from a storm, a novel set on a Greek island should be the perfect summer read. Yet although sea, sand and sex abound in the pages, a cloud passes in front of the hot Cretan sun in the final third of the novel. Zorba the Greek opens with the narrator grieving over the departure of his friend, Stavridaki, who has gone away to fight; it ends with the narrator grieving again for Stavridaki, and for the loss of much more. This is a novel of many deaths, from the butterfly forced out of its cocoon too soon to die on the narrator’s palm, to the unexpected brutality of the mob execution of the narrator’s lover.
Far from being „unputdownable“, this is a novel that demands you put it down so that you can go out and enjoy life. It condemns the passivity of the narrator, sitting and smoking while running grains of sand through his fingers, contrasting it with the life-affirming ardour of Zorba, a living embodiment of the belief that books can tell you only so much about humanity. Even as you read it, you can sense Zorba shouting at you: ‚Don’t spend all of your summer reading! Go out there and live life boss!‘
I never got the opportunity to read Zorba on Crete – happy is the woman who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea, and unhappy was the woman whose companion pinched her copy as soon as we arrived – but I finally got round to it on holiday in Rome this summer. Perhaps, one day, I’ll return to Crete to read it again, while smelling the citrus trees, listening to the waves and watching the swallows and wagtails. If I did I would be making the same mistake as the narrator. Instead I should be accumulating lovers, anecdotes and culinary skills like the great Greek himself, whose self-written obituary proclaims: „I’ve done heaps and heaps of things in my life, but I still did not do enough.“
Love this song: [youtube=http://youtu.be/anXQvf8i0Wc]
Lyrics:
Can’t remember anything at all
Flame trees line the streets
Can’t remember anything at all
But I’m driving my car down to Geneva
I’ve been sitting in my basement patio
It was hot
Up above, girls walk past, the roses all in bloom
Have you ever heard about the Higgs Boson blues
I’m goin‘ down to Geneva baby, gonna teach it to you
Who cares, who cares what the future brings?
Black road long and I drove and drove
I came upon a crossroad
The night was hot and black
I see Robert Johnson,
With a ten dollar guitar strapped to his back,
Lookin‘ for a tune
Well here comes Lucifer,
With his canon law,
And a hundred black babies runnin‘ from his genocidal jaw
He got the real killer groove
Robert Johnson and the devil man
Don’t know who’s gonna rip off who
Driving my car, flame trees on fire
Sitting and singin‘ the Higgs Boson blues,
I’m tired, I’m lookin‘ for a spot to drop
All the clocks have stopped in Memphis now
In the Lorraine Motel, it’s hot, it’s hot
That’s why they call it the Hot Spot
I take a room with a view
Hear a man preaching in a language that’s completely new, yea
Making the hot cots in the flophouse bleed
While the cleaning ladies sob into their mops
And a bell hop hops and bops
A shot rings out to a spiritual groove
Everybody bleeding to that Higgs Boson Blues
If I die tonight, bury me
In my favorite yellow patent leather shoes
With a mummified cat and a cone-like hat
That the caliphate forced on the Jews
Can you feel my heartbeat?
Can you feel my heartbeat?
Hannah Montana does the African Savannah
As the simulated rainy season begins
She curses the queue at the Zoo loo
And moves on to Amazonia
And cries with the dolphins
Mama ate the pygmy
The pygmy ate the monkey
The monkey has a gift that he is sending back to you
Look here comes the missionary
With his smallpox and flu
He’s saving them, the savages
With his Higgs Boson Blues
I’m driving my car down to Geneva
I’m driving my car down to Geneva
Oh let the damn day break
The rainy days always make me sad
Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake
And you’re the best girl I’ve ever had
Can’t remember anything at all
And one last song, also from the terrific recent album ‚Push the Sky Away‘ (2013): ‚Jubilee Street‘
[youtube=http://youtu.be/G6rTZe6gtS8]
Interview mit dem Gewinner des World Press Photo Award Stanmeyer – SPIEGEL ONLINE.
Es ist ein großartiges Bild, poetisch und bedrückend zugleich: Afrikanische Flüchtlinge versuchen am Strand von Dschibuti, ein Handysignal aus ihrer Heimat zu bekommen. John Stanmeyer erhält für diese Aufnahme den World Press Photo Award. Hier erzählt er, wie er das Foto machte.
John Stanmeyer, 49, ist Fotograf und Blogger. Sein Handwerk lernte er am Art Institute in Florida, aber sein eigentlicher Lehrmeister sei das Leben gewesen, sagt er. Von der World Press Photo-Stiftung ist er mit dem Preis für das beste Pressefoto 2014 ausgezeichnet worden. Er arbeitet vor allem für „National Geographic“, und das am liebsten allein.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Herr Stanmeyer, für Ihre Aufnahme von afrikanischen Migranten am Strand von Dschibuti sind Sie mit dem World Press Photo Award ausgezeichnet worden. Was hat Sie dorthin verschlagen?
John Stanmeyer: Das war der Endpunkt einer langen Reise. Angefangen hatte die in einem Dort in Äthiopien, wo Forscher Fossilien gefunden haben, die darauf schließen lassen, dass die Migration von Menschen in Afrika dort vor 60.000 Jahren begonnen hat. Zusammen mit einem Kollegen habe ich von dort aus diesen Wanderungen nachgespürt. Wir waren zwei Monate mit dem Auto und zu Fuß unterwegs, als wir schließlich in Dschibuti ankamen.SPIEGEL ONLINE: Und wie sind Sie dann zu den Menschen am Strand gestoßen?
Stanmeyer: Am zweiten Tag bin ich dort spazieren gegangen und auf eine Gruppe Menschen gestoßen, die ihre Handys in die Luft hielten. Ich habe den Übersetzer gefragt: ‚Was machen die da?‘ Er sagte, das seien Somalis, die versuchen, ein Telefonsignal aus ihrem Heimatland zu bekommen. Sie benutzen somalische Sim-Karten, die sie auf dem Schwarzmarkt kaufen. Damit können sie mit ihren Verwandten für nur ein paar Cents stundenlang sprechen. Dafür brauchen sie aber das Signal; Somalia ist von dort aus immerhin 40 Kilometer entfernt.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Und dann haben Sie sofort das Foto gemacht?
Stanmeyer: Nein, ich bin ein paar Mal dorthin gekommen, so zwei bis drei Nächte nacheinander. Mal waren zehn Menschen an dem Strand, am nächsten Tag dann 30. Sie sind immer von rechts nach links gelaufen, um den besten Platz zum Telefonieren zu finden. In dem Moment, in dem das Foto dann entstanden ist, standen zufällig so viele Menschen auf einem Fleck. Sekunden später sind sie wieder auseinander gelaufen.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Auf Ihrer Reise haben Sie sicherlich viele Aufnahmen gemacht. Was ist das Besondere an diesem Foto?
Stanmeyer: Das Timing war ziemlich einzigartig. Dazu der Vollmond, nichts davon ist gestellt. Als ich das Foto gemacht habe, habe ich einfach gespürt, dass hier etwas ganz Außergewöhnliches passiert.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Außergewöhnlich genug, um den wichtigsten Preis der Branche zu gewinnen?
Stanmeyer: Ich mache so etwas nicht für Awards. Ich bin sehr dankbar dafür, dass ich sehr selbstbestimmt arbeiten kann. Das Bild habe ich in letzter Minute eingereicht, weil es ein wichtiges Projekt für mich ist. Wir hätten aber auch ein anderes Motiv auswählen können. Letztlich hatten wir aber das Gefühl, dass die Migration in Afrika heute wie vor 60.000 Jahren dadurch am Besten symbolisiert wird.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Was denken Sie, was sehen andere Menschen darin?
Stanmeyer: Wir können uns alle selbst darin sehen. Ich habe während der Zeit häufig versucht, meine Familie zu erreichen. Und ich wette, Sie kennen das auch, dass man im Haus umher läuft und versucht, besseren Empfang zu bekommen. In uns allen ist doch dieses Bedürfnis, sich mit denen vernetzen zu wollen, die wir lieben und die uns wichtig sind. Ich kann meinen Nachbarn auf dem Bild sehen, ich kann Sie dort sehen und mich selbst auch. Eigentlich habe ich mich dort selbst fotografiert.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Es hat also auch viel mit Ihnen persönlich zu tun.
Stanmeyer: Mit mir und meiner Familiengeschichte, ja. Meine Mutter ist Österreicherin. Sie musste nach dem Zweiten Weltkriegs fliehen und war plötzlich von ihrer Heimat abgeschnitten. Das muss sehr schmerzhaft gewesen sein. Heute hat fast jeder ein Mobiltelefon und damit diese unglaubliche Möglichkeit, die Menschen, die einem nahestehen, zu erreichen. Wir können uns mit der wichtigsten Sache überhaupt verbinden, und das ist unsere Heimat.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Kritiker sehen in Ihrem Bild vielleicht nicht viel mehr als Menschen mit Smartphones in der Hand. Was entgegnen Sie denen?
Stanmeyer: Natürlich hat heute jeder ein Smartphone, man könnte also auch sagen: Was soll’s? Es ist jedem selbst überlassen, wie er das Bild interpretiert. Aber es ist wichtig, dass die Menschen verstehen, was hier passiert. Menschen, die auswandern, müssen diesen Schritt manchmal unternehmen, um aus einem Konflikt herauszukommen. Andere hoffen auf ökonomische Möglichkeiten. Sie suchen etwas, das viele von uns als selbstverständlich ansehen. Und die einzige Möglichkeit für sie, sich ein Stück Zuhause zu bewahren, ist das Mobiltelefon.SPIEGEL ONLINE: Was wird für Sie nach der Auszeichnung kommen?
Stanmeyer: Ich bin jetzt schon sehr priviligiert, da ich fast ausnahmslos für „National Geographic“ arbeiten darf. An der „Out of Eden“ Geschichte etwa, aus der ja das Foto stammt, haben wir sieben Jahre lang gearbeitet. Ich bin sehr dankbar dafür, dass ich an solchen Projekten teilnehmen darf. Vielleicht finde ich aber auch etwas, das mir erlaubt, mehr Zeit mit meiner Familie zu verbringen – und Zuhause zu sein.
Harry Quebert: The French thriller that has taken the world by storm – Telegraph.
Two years ago, Joël Dicker, a Swiss man in his mid-twenties, wrote a novel about a man in his mid-twenties who writes a novel. The book in the book becomes a bestseller, and the protagonist, Marcus Goldman, spends the next 700 pages trying to hide from, and live up to, his new-found fame.
What Dicker turned out to be writing was not just a book but his own future. A few weeks after The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair was published in France, it became the most talked-about French novel of the decade. It has now sold more than two million copies, is about to be translated into 32 languages and will be published in both Britain and the United States in May. Very few foreign-language novels make big waves in anglophone countries, but this one seems genuinely likely to buck the trend – and to judge by what went on behind the scenes, publishing insiders have known that for some time.
Dicker is now 28 years old, and a little unsure, still, what’s hit him. “It’s completely backwards!” he says of the self-fulfilling prophecy. We are sitting in a hotel bar in London, one of countless foreign cities to which Dicker has been whisked off by publicists. He is a sweet, gentlemanly sort – a lawyer by training – whose hype has reached a pitch of near-comedy. In Britain, his book is being sent out with a press release advertising Dicker as “Switzerland’s coolest export since Roger Federer”.
“It makes me realise that what I wrote was wrong,” he reflects, “because success isn’t like that when you’re living it. In my book, the guy’s novel becomes a bestseller and he takes off on holiday. I haven’t had a holiday for two years because I’ve been promoting this book!” He laughs. “Though some small details have happened to me too: the posters in the Metro, the display devoted to him in his old school…”
Dicker admits that he has become so recognisable in his native Geneva that he can’t have conversations on his mobile phone in public places, and his girlfriend – a sports psychologist for the Geneva hockey team – has taken a while to get used to it. Since September 2012, when the book was first published in French, his life has been, in his own description, “a crazy whirlwind”.
Still, success didn’t happen quite as overnight as that suggests. The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is in fact the sixth book Dicker has written. Only one other has been published – Les derniers jours de nos pères, a book about the Second World War Special Operations Executive, sometimes known as “Churchill’s secret army”. It came out in January 2012 to little fanfare, and sold no more than a few hundred copies. Dispirited, Dicker sent out his next manuscript to as many publishers as he could; it was instantly intercepted with enthusiasm by the man who had published his first, who insisted on releasing it – to Dicker’s slight mystification – immediately.
I first heard of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair a month after that, at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It is rare, these days, for a single book to generate widespread whispers of excitement. But in October 2012, “the French novel with the long title” was genuinely the talk of the town. Everywhere you went, people would mention this book, sometimes pulling a folded piece of paper from their pockets to remind themselves of the name.
After Frankfurt, there was not so much a bidding war as a series of human stealth bombs. Matters were complicated – and made infinitely more intriguing – by the fact that the book had been published by a tiny house run by an 87-year-old man who had been about to wind up his business when Dicker’s manuscript arrived. Bernard de Fallois, a legendary editor who has counted among his close friends and authors the late Marcel Pagnol and Georges Simenon, made his name as a young editor at Gallimard when he found, assembled and published two manuscripts by Marcel Proust. Proust’s unfinished Jean Santeuil and critical work Contre Sainte-Beuve saw the light thanks to Fallois.
Christopher MacLehose, the publishing titan who brought us Stieg Larsson, thought the UK deal had been sealed in his favour by the time Frankfurt was over, but at least two female editors from separate major publishers subsequently flew to Paris to try to coax the elderly Frenchman into handing over the manuscript. The plot thickened.
In France by then, the book was everywhere. It won the Académie Française novel prize and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens; it was shortlisted for the main Goncourt. But how often does the rest of the world care about the novel that wins the Goncourt prize? It’s no secret that, having led the charge through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, French fiction is now at a rather low ebb. But The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair seemed to mark a shift: it’s a cleverly constructed literary novel that is also a thriller; a novel written in French that is set in the US; a book full of dialogue that taps into trends set by high-end, well-written American television dramas. And so it became, in a way, French culture’s advertisement for itself. There was a period when, if you arrived off the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord, every inch of window space in the main newsagents was taken up by copies of Dicker’s book. The white cover with its inlaid Edward Hopper painting was so ubiquitous in Paris as to seem like a hallucination.
The book’s central plot concerns a murder investigation in New Hampshire, reopened 33 years after the events in question when two bodies are dug up in someone’s backyard. That backyard happens to belong to Harry Quebert, a much-loved novelist in his sixties who is still famous for a single book. Inevitably, the locals in the town of Aurora turn against him, and he is arrested. The only person who retains his faith in him is Quebert’s former student, the starry young novelist Marcus Goldman, now crippled with writer’s block. Goldman sets out to solve the mystery, and the result becomes his second book.
It’s like Twin Peaks meets Atonement meets In Cold Blood, with a bromance between literary jocks and some suspected paedophilia thrown in. It’s about fame and infamy, writing and love, theft and imposture; about murder, madness, and religious zealotry. It’s about guilt: not just in the criminal sense, but as an emotion that can dog you for life. It is breathtakingly plotted. But the fiendishness of the book’s construction is not merely mathematical; it relies on the built-in ambivalence of each character, or there wouldn’t be enough left to withhold for so long. The case looks to be solved several times, yet 100 pages before the end (of a 700-page total), just when all loose ends appear to have been tied, a sudden spinning ambiguity erupts in the clues. And we’re still a good couple of resolutions away from the truth.
Dicker has been compared to Nabokov and Roth – more, it must be said, for fleeting resemblances of subject matter than for anything more molecular. But there is the question of forbidden love, of many kinds, and whether love should be allowed at any cost. There is the New England setting – inspired by summers Dicker spent in Maine as a child, and immersively convincing. There are four books within the book, and despite an initial section that gives us some background on the narrator and his mentor, the reopened murder case takes over and moves addictively fast.
Also, it makes you ask: who is taking advantage of whom? Yes, someone somewhere is a murderer, but there are also people making money out of that – the lawyers, the agents, the publisher who fantasises that the name of the murder victim could become a registered trademark. Dicker is not afraid of satirising the publishing industry, or the idea of celebrity itself. Everyone wants a piece of someone, and the quest for ownership, his book suggests, doesn’t end with death.
MacLehose, who has overseen Sam Taylor’s seamless translation, describes The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair as “a kind of reader’s dream. I hadn’t read a book as cleverly contrived as that for a very long time. People are going to measure other books by what he has done here.” He chuckles a little when I say how much it reminded me of Twin Peaks. “I told Joël: don’t let Fallois sell the film rights until he has explored the possibility of a 20-part television series.”
Is it a French book, or is it an American book? And now that you can read the novel in English, does it make any difference? Dicker has been quite relaxed about the translation, and says he was happy to let the editors of the American edition (to be published by Penguin) change things they thought rang false. “It’s your territory,” he told them. But MacLehose advised him to be cautious. “He said, it’s a French book, set in the United States.” And that may be part of its success: Dicker is simply telling a story, not trying to be something else. The French edition contains no American jargon or slang. When asked if he was inspired by American film or TV, Dicker admits that he had not even seen Twin Peaks until so many people compared his book to it that he was forced to find out what they were talking about. He is not a film buff. If you prod him for literary role models he comes up with Romain Gary, then Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. He enjoys American literature, of course – “Steinbeck, Roth…” he says with a shrug – but this novel has sprung from that peculiar mix of an all-American setting and 20th-century French storytelling. It is a whole new thing.
Dicker tries to make light of his strangely peripatetic life. There are only, he says, “minor annoyances within a much greater joy”, and wherever he is, there is always Skype. “My day-to-day life hasn’t really changed,” he says, meaning that his friends are the same and his girlfriend is the same and he doesn’t live on a metaphorical red carpet. But surely now, I suggest, there is no day-to-day life? He smiles, and gives up. “No,” he repeats quietly, “There is no day-to-day life.”
‚The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair‘ by Joël Dicker will be published by MacLehose Press in May
Mit seinem packenden Roman einer Mischung aus Thriller, Liebesgeschichte und Entwicklungsroman sorgte der junge Genfer Autor Joël Dicker für die Sensation im französischen Bücherherbst 2012.
Zum Inhalt: Der hochangesehene Literaturprofessor und Erfolgsautor Harry Quebert gerät als Mörder in Verdacht: Ausgerechnet in seinem Garten findet man die sterblichen Überreste seiner jugendlichen Geliebten Nola, die vor 35 Jahren spurlos verschwunden war.
Queberts ehemaliger Student, der Schrifsteller Marcus Goldmann, will die Unschuld seines Mentors beweisen und macht die Tätersuche gleichzeitig zum Stoff eines neuen Romans.
Im Gespräch mit Luzia Stettler erzählt Joël Dicker vom Entstehen dieser raffiniert gebauten Geschichte und von den Erfahrungen als literarischer Popstar: sein Buch erntete mehrere Preise und breites Lob, und wird jetzt in über 30 Sprachen übersetzt.
Buch- und Hörbuchhinweis:
Joël Dicker. Die Wahrheit über den Fall Harry Quebert. Aus dem Französischen von Carina von Enzenberg. Piper, 2013.
Joël Dicker. Die Wahrheit über den Fall Harry Quebert. Ungekürzte Lesung. Sprecher: Torben Kessler. Osterwold Audio, 2013.
Sochi 2014: world authors join protest against Putin. (Guardian 6 Feb 2014)
More than 200 prominent international authors, including Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen, have joined forces to denounce the „chokehold“ they say Russia’s anti-gay and blasphemy laws place on the freedom of expression, amid a growing swell of protest on the eve of the opening of the Sochi Winter Olympics.
The authors‘ open letter, published in the Guardian on Thursday, comes as athletes and journalists from around the world descend on the Black Sea resort before the lavish opening ceremony at a specially built stadium on Friday evening. President Vladimir Putin has spoken of the Games as a personal project to show the world Russia’s greatness and its ability to host such major events, but the build-up has been marred by controversy over corruption and rights abuses in Russia.
The open letter to Russia condemns the recently passed gay propaganda and blasphemy laws, which respectively prohibit the „propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations“ among minors and criminalise religious insult, as well as the recent recriminalisation of defamation. The three laws „specifically put writers at risk“, say the authors, and they „cannot stand quietly by as we watch our fellow writers and journalists pressed into silence or risking prosecution and often drastic punishment for the mere act of communicating their thoughts“.
(…)
A wonderful image from the mountain range of Dikti by Kampitakis brothers reminds us of Nikos Kazantzakis words:
„I choose the ascending path because my heart drives me towards it. “Upward! Upward! Upward! ” my heart shouts, and I follow it trustingly“
