cultivate big kindness like a Greek
The chapter opens with a reference to Erich Fromm’s post‑war writings, especially Escape from Freedom, where Fromm argues that “love and work” are the sole solution for the individualized man’s relationship to the world. The narrator echoes this, describing how she has loved work since her first job at eleven packing nursery trays, and how that love steers her toward “the right thing” and a communal bond with humanity. She then confesses her “coward point” – an aversion to fully intimate, vulnerable love – illustrated by a recent Instagram message to her South‑African friend Adrian: “I love humanity, I just find real‑life humans hard.”
Seeking a remedy, she turns to Greece, which she personifies as a teacher that “lures” her and “puts its value of therapy hand up.” She portrays herself as an Odysseus navigating sirens, perpetually on a journey “always in love – kind, big, fully human unconditional love.” During this pilgrimage she meets Eleni, a scarred Ikarian woman roughly her own age, who tells her bluntly, “Greece either catches you, or spits you out. It’s up to you.” This exchange frames the upcoming lesson.
The narrative then shifts to an exposition on philotimo, described as “love of honour” and “the honour of love.” The narrator cites a BBC interview with a lecturer in Ancient Greek philology who claims the term has no precise translation and is a cornerstone of the Greek disposition. She recounts a personal epiphany while hiking in Greece, where the experience of philotimo “brought her back to life and what mattered in an instant,” cementing the concept as a guiding principle for cultivating “big kindness.”