Zorba the Greek

Zorba spends the night with Hortense and returns in the morning. The narrator smokes and remembers when he and his friend saw a statue of Rembrandt's The Man with the Golden Helmet. The narrator thinks of both meaning and lack of meaning. Zorba scolds the narrator for leaving without offering Hortense “compliments” (46). Zorba claims all women want to be desired and recalls wooing a girl as a young man, while a neighboring eighty-year-old woman put on airs. When Zorba had lashed out at her for being pathetic, she’d cursed him and died shortly thereafter, blaming him. Now sixty-five, Zorba regrets it, as he is still interested in pursuing women.

This makes the narrator remember seeing a work of art where a hand held the embracing figures of a man and woman, called The Hand of God. A girl had been looking at it beside the narrator, and the narrator asked for her thoughts. The girl told him that the sculpture made her want freedom more than love, and that she would wish to escape the hand. The narrator responded that perhaps obeying the hand represents freedom, but the girl didn’t understand, and the narrator felt he had been too abstract.