‘By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what i mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion, or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach from the funeral pyre of Patroklos.
Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of anciet Greek. How can I make you see it, this strnage, harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beerthe tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and while i find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me uttery when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks, a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action mutliply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.’
-Donna Tartt, ‘The Secret History’.
