Seferis's allusions to the feverish mood of people and politicians reveal a curious mix of irony and resignation. "At the Ministry yesterday morning: I seemed to smell the pharmaceutical emissions of a hospital. It's an intense sensation that grabs me by the nostrils, as though I'm in some refuge for rare neurotics." The poet allows himself an awareness of the social climate only through the screen of his own detachment. On a New Year's Eve in Athens he is appalled by the chaos and aimlessness of a raucous crowd; yet he writes as though the lack of coherence that plagues these men and women were fated--a component of the national dissolution cast in iron by the Furies. His strange passivity in the face of political turmoil defies reality, turning slogans into stage props and demonstrators into actors.

With individuals, he is different. An incident at night, involving a prostitute, affects you with the immediacy of Seferis's reaction and his psychological participation.

I ran, trying to see from afar. A body was rolling on the ground, and a man was bent over it, beating it. Three or four policemen and two or three passersby looked on indifferently. The woman shouted, writing on the ground....I was beside myself....'Can't four men handle a woman,'I said, 'must they beat her?' I was impressed with the apathy of the spectators. They were ordinary people. 'Don't get angry, Mister,' someone said, 'she's a whore'....The woman was obviously now going through a fit of hysterics. As they were taking her to the police station...she would sit down on the ground every five steps, scream and lift up her clothes, revealing her nakedness, to show the bruises. 'I'm a prostitute, is that why they have to whip me? It's the pimp's fault--I'll show him!'

The description is stark and real, unlike his impressionistic comments on the Ministry. He evokes the personality of a village Turk, Tsopan, with similar interest and detail--even remembering that the man offered his guests coffee two at a time, because he only owned one pair of demitasses.

THE DIARY reflects a diffusion between the poet's life and work that eludes anecdote, rumor or publisher's blurbs. The song wafted from a nearby taverna and overheard at night; the grace in three ancient pieces of a fallen lintel lit by the noon sun; grief for a cat's death. This interplay of nature, humanity and inanimate objects that affects the fragile balance of Seferis's poetry, always startles him.

Once George Seferis wrote that it is the plight of an artist who grew on a harsh and secluded bit of earth to throw bottles into the sea, without complaint for a greater reward. Whether the mediterranean land that claimed him is any less remote to us now, the life this poet spent on it doesn't need to be. This bottle is worth finding.