In 1960, Leonard Cohen moved to Hydra for the summer. He made the decision on a whim: he had walked into a bank in London and, upon talking to a tanned banker who spoke of an unforgettable island in the Aegean Sea, he made the decision to move there. He would arrive to find a thriving expat community of artists, writers and singers and, until 1967, would call the island home.
The circumstances that drove Leonard and this community of creatives to a rural island in Greece are well documented now. A widely hated war, a growing civil rights movement, the dawn of hallucinogenic drugs: an entire generation of teenagers was coming of age in one of the most tumultuous times in history, and, as a result, were actively rejecting the lifestyles that their conservative parents had lived. Historians would later dub the era as the counterculture movement and Leonard, whilst a struggling 20-something poet at the time, would become one of its leading figures by the time he turned 30.
I am writing this whilst sitting in a tiny home that I have rented on an island in the Aegean Sea. Since I arrived, I have been unable to stop thinking about Leonard Cohen. I first learned about the artist’s love affair with Greece in a documentary called “Words of Love”, which I watched one gloomy afternoon in London, about a year before the pandemic began. The story is a sad one, really – ultimately, the reckless lifestyle the expats lived in Hydra would push them and their offspring to ruin and depression – but I was taken by the romanticism of it all: the grainy footage of an impossibly blue sea basked in sunshine, and this breathtaking island where one had the freedom to write all day in the baking white heat, if one chose to. It seemed like a good fantasy to escape into, even if the outcome was one of ruin.
When the circumstances in my life pointed to change, I had only Greece on my mind. I wanted to go to Hydra, but it is far too popular and expensive now, so chose nearby Sifnos instead. I arrived three days ago thinking I would be entering a quiet medieval village on an undiscovered island, but have found that I am a few years too late. There are others like me, – “many others”, an American woman who has been living here for over 20 years told me this afternoon – all living out this fantasy.
Last night I sat in my local wine bar overlooking the tiny bay below, twinkling from the lights of the jostling tavernas nearby, and I reflected how similar the circumstances are now to those of the 1960s: a hateful war (take your pick of them). A civil rights movement. A climate crisis. A refugee crisis. An inflation crisis. And further more, escape into drugs and hedonism seems more essential than ever after 2.5 years of being locked in our homes. The young Frenchman serving me my organic orange wine quit his life in Paris and moved to Athens, and now this island, without any plan. “I needed to leave,” he said. He doesn’t have an idea of what follows this summer but is sure “the island” will show him the way.
I have to admit that my story is not too unlike his. Perhaps we are a part of a second wave counterculture. Although, I am certain it is one that Cohen and his friends would shudder at. I am, after all, sipping biodynamic wine whilst wearing, like everyone else here, Birkenstocks. The Frenchman is wearing Carhartt (and the bar owner, Patagonia). A record player belts out Khruangbin into the cobalt night. There’s something incredibly familiar in the shape of this all: a London-approved coolness that has been relocated in form and expression to this blot in the ocean. If this is a second wave something it is perhaps more like an Encounter Culture: a wave of restless young adults looking for escape whilst needing desperately to be seen, to belong, through cool brands or on Instagram posts or by fellow aestheticists who recognise a comrade when they see one.
I’m not the only one to make this conclusion tonight. “It’s just like Brooklyn!” a highly intoxicated Aussie yelps out beside me. “I swear, darling, this could be Brooklyn,” she slurs into the ear of the large Greek man whose lap she is perched on.
“How did you come to be here?” she mumbles at me. She’s wasted. Wobbling and writhing in her body from too much alcohol, and I can’t be sure of what else. Her face is rattling with every syllable, and the man she is with makes me uncomfortable by the way he is looking at her.
“Quite by chance,” I say. She seems to like this answer judging by the wooping, grunting laugh that suddenly emits from her small mouth. “Me too!” she snorts, “Me too! By chance! Where the fuck are we, even!”
“But you didn’t answer my question” she says, suddenly serious.
Strange, I think. I wonder if she is okay, safe, and what help I could give if the answer to that thought was, indeed, no. I repeat the answer, and then ask her if she is on holiday. No, she says. “Travelling non-stop,” she grins. I’m curious. I press for an answer on how she affords this rock and roll lifestyle and she tells me, “Everyone died”.
I nod and hear myself saying the words “okay” and “right”. She looks about 40 years old. Tanned. Over plucked eyebrows. A sweet woman, maybe, in a former life. And my heart breaks for her, as she nestles onto the knee of her chosen lover for the evening. I think I see shades of me in her recklessness: her demanding the boys at the bar play her favourite song (“We don’t have that on vinyl, sorry”). Her uncoordinated dancing. Her declaring, through slurred, clenched teeth, “I could DIE here, I could die here”.
She is asking me questions I don’t need to answer, but I am invested now.
“What do you think the point of all this is?” she says.
“Life?”
“Yeah.”
I think for a moment and answer, “to not die”, because that seems like a good enough reply. She doesn’t respond. I wonder if she is doing the same dance with grief that I am, or if hers is something vastly different. Darker. I ask her for an answer to the same question and she says, “I don’t ask questions I can’t answer myself”.
“What do you think the point of being alive is?” she tries again.
“To not be shit person.”
“I’d rather be a shit person than a liar.”
I ask the guys at the bar for the bill. It is time to go,
“Isn’t that the same thing?” I ask as I hand over my card. I get up to leave, bidding her and her silent partner goodnight. She either doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t care.
“You’re a shit person,” she says as I walk past, taking a drag off her cigarette.
The comment knocks me. So unexpected and peculiar an encounter this has been. I consider replying, but realise there’s no one behind those glassy eyes anymore.
“Surreal” is how the Frenchman would describe the evening to me later on. On my way home something scuttles through the dark and I think it is a rat, but see it is a hedgehog.
My summer on the island has begun.