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spirit of this city which is like no other, and the impression you have of people and vehicles pushing and jumping in panic on top of each other, like sheep do when loaded into a lorry.
    In the office the usual chaos. I chat with the girls who are sunburnt and full of remarks. And then, I work casually on a borrowed computer for an hour or so before leaving to pick up Chloé after school.
    When I leave the building, I’m enveloped by the early September heat with its white, even light and its slight breeze, and an idea comes to me like a friend who comes up behind you and puts his hands over your eyes and asks you to guess who he is: the idea that this heat and this light, which are the rule in Athens from May to mid-June and fromSeptember to mid-October, abolish the frontier between inside and outside.
    Of buildings, of course, but also of bodies. It’s the same temperature out of doors as in the intimacy of a bedroom or in the tunnels of your veins. There are no more barriers or outlines. The whole world (physical and psychic) is a huge, seamless sheet – but a three-dimensional one in which you are submerged. An aquarium in which everything is at the same time the inhabitant, the water, and the glass.
    I pursued this line of thought, for I realised it has something to do with my vision of this country. It helped me to formulate what I feel about the people, the climate, the land, and the Greek way of thinking. The inside and the outside are one here, communicating. The other and the self are united. No fundamental difference. Everything exists in a state of homogeneity, coherence, solidarity, consistency. This doesn’t mean that all realities and relations are harmonious and trouble-free. On the contrary. But everything is comprehensible, near, share-able, easy to imagine; everything is part of the same flux. ‘You understand me, I understand you, you live this today, I will live it tomorrow, you know what it’s like, your body sweats, mine also, I know what you’re going through …’
    The earth, the sea, and the sky have shared out their empire. Old men stroll in pyjamas along the filthy street. Every evening, from the balcony opposite mine, comes semi-oriental music for the whole neighbourhood! The same dust is everywhere. Everybody talks like a mother to a child. Tummy rumblingsare something universal. People recognise one another, not in accordance with any particular respect due, but in accordance with the common reality of their human bodies.
    Each body is one body among others and equal with them. If someone comes forward, it is usually to represent the others – like the coryphaeus of an antique chorus. This lack of politeness and civility, which so shocks foreigners, comes directly from a notion of democracy first formulated in ancient Greece. Why bother with formal gestures and hypocritical compliments when everyone is familiar with the needs, the feelings, and the thoughts of everyone else? All are part of the same chain, and each is potentially in the skin of another. When people act selfishly, they do so allowing for the selfishness of others.
    Greeks start from the principle that they know themselves (not with their brains, like the French, but because they’ve lived). Armed with Socratic sayings, they extend their knowledge towards others. They go out to meet the outside because they’ve come to terms with what’s inside.
    They have no need to make themselves pretty or to wrap things up: the polite bows, the fashionable clothes, all forms of dressing up here have either been imported or artifically brought in by the Church or the powers that be. Otherwise, the Greeks’ awareness of their own collectivity encourages a unique minimalism, to be seen in their buildings, in their social relations, in their cooking (the butchers simply display dead flesh), and in their everyday philosophy. The very complexityof life is simple for them. Everything is in