Zorba is a free man. The narrator in the novel admires Zorba for this and hires him as the manager of a lignite mine.
At first, Zorba seemed like someone who simply lived however he wanted. In the early part of the book, he even came across as someone who said, “I’m free,” despite lacking any real ability. So I began to think that even if something is called freedom, it can only be genuine freedom when the source of that choice comes truly from within oneself, rather than from deprivation or some external motivation.
But as I continued reading, there was another scene in which I truly felt that Zorba was free. It was when he squandered the large sum of money the narrator had entrusted to him for the cable car project, yet did not hide or run away. Instead, he sent a letter and eventually returned.
Zorba lives as he wishes, but he does not run away from the work entrusted to him. He uses every means available to him to make the undertaking succeed, and he also takes responsibility for the outcome. He had the ability to lead the workers at the lignite mine, and in the end he proved to his employer, the narrator, that he was someone he needed. He is a person who possesses ability, responsibility, and trustworthiness while also remaining free.
By contrast, the narrator in the novel is someone who went through a conventional education and learned most of the world through books. Watching him made me ask myself several questions as well.
Am I truly free?
Are the choices I’m making now really choices I made myself?
Or was I moved by fear?
Did I choose them because of some lack within me?
Did I choose them because I was afraid of other people’s opinions or external pressure?
In the end, my answer was that there are no correct answers in life to begin with. I felt that life is less about finding the right answer and more about turning what I have chosen into the right answer.
I, too, have admired freedom and have tried, whenever possible, to make autonomous choices about my life. That was why I also tried to seek out environments where I could choose freely. But thinking about it now, the compulsion that “I must be free” may itself have become a kind of framework that sometimes bound my freedom.
And freedom came with corresponding responsibility. While reading the book, I felt that in order to become truly free, it is not enough simply to refuse to listen to what others say. I also need to be able to bear the consequences of my choices and not run away from myself because of failure or guilt.
This led me to an even bigger question. Who created the things I learned at school and came to take for granted, as well as the paths through life that people generally call the “right answers”? Could education and the mass media be systems created to efficiently produce the kinds of people society needs? Could the paths to success and the values I had naturally believed in all this time also have been “right answers” within an order created by someone else?
At the same time, I had thought that a certain amount of power was necessary in order to have freedom. But the power I mean here is not simply money or fame. It is closer to the power to create an environment in which I can laugh and joke as I please, and the power to define my own answers rather than merely follow the answers created by others.
But Zorba is also somewhat different from this. He is not someone who first creates a system that benefits him and then becomes free. Even within a society filled with external pressure, he does not submit; he simply lives as he wishes. I think what makes that possible is courage: the courage to be honest with oneself and not run away from one’s choices or mistakes.
And one of the things I liked most about the book was that Zorba was not someone who had searched from the beginning for “what I truly love.” He simply did various kinds of work, went to different places, met people, failed, and then took on other work. In the process, it seemed as though the things he loved and his own way of life gradually accumulated.
I think I had always believed that I needed to find the thing I loved perfectly before doing anything else. But perhaps it is precisely through going to random places, entering my uncomfortable zone, and trying things I never expected that I come to understand what kind of person I am.
Dreams and the things we love do not seem to exist somewhere in a completed form waiting to be discovered. They seem more like traces that emerge as we live.
I came to think that the things ultimately needed along that process are ability, the confidence to make choices, a sense of responsibility, and freedom.
ps.
(It was a book that moved me, but personally I found it boring, so I was bored while reading it.)