In Journey to the Morea he (Kazantzakis) tells this characteristic anecdote about a visit he once made to Sparta with the poet Sikilianos :
...A curious flower upon a fence had caught our eye; we stopped to pluck it. Children clustered around us.
"What do you call this flower?" we asked.
No one knew. Then a dark-haired little boy jumped up : "Auntie Lenio will know!" he said.
"Run and call her!"we told him.
The little boy ran off toward the town, and we waited, holding the flower. We admired it, sniffed it, but were impatient; we longed for the word. And then, in a short while, the boy returned.
"Auntie Lenio,"he said, "died the other day."
Our hearts constricted. We sensed that a word had perished; perished, and now no one could place it in a verse and render it immortal. We were terrified. Never had death seemed to us so irrevocable. And we left the flower spread out on the fence, like a corpse.
( KAZANTZAKIS and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature
Peter Bien, Princeton -1972)
( Tragic as the loss of a word is for civilization, i can not help wondering whether the other little flowers - besides feeling grief for the death of their companion - weren't somehow relieved : ah.....nameless again...after 10,000 years!)
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