TRAVELING CHINA JAPAN

The Great Traveller Nikos Kazantzakis, in this extraordinary traveling book, delves deep into the soul of the Far East, seeking happiness, spirituality, freedom, and triumphantly concluding in a mystical marriage between the Chinese and the Hellenic cultures:

 

"If you scrape the skin of a Chinaman, you will find a Greek. If you scrape the skin of a Greek, you will find a Chinaman. Circe, surely, must have been Chinese. How all white skinned Sirens seem naive and unprincipled, primitive, illiterate in love, clumsy and shallow, confusing pleasure with happiness or sport or gold. Here, instead, pleasure breaks the boundaries of the individual, transcends the human Cry, reaches down to the root of the earth – to the animal, to the plant, to the dead.”

 

In this book, Dear Reader, you too will find your long-hidden, joyous self, beyond the traumas of this life, the daily difficulties and compromises, the mental burdens, all the things we have learned (or have been taught as true) and which, thus, in time have become our normality:

 

"I open my eyes, barely holding back from crying out with joy. I never expected to see the face of the Earth so rich, so colorful. An all-consuming drunkenness takes hold of me: the desire to mingle with all this abundant, thick-headed mass! Oh happiness, how you are a simple ordinary miracle, just like water, and we do not even realize it."