Peter Fiennes travels across Greece in an attempt to connect Greek mythology with modern-day beliefs. He travels back in time to find out if these stories can help us understand our world and what we have done to it. His quest is for hope and beauty, and he will encounter both, but also their opposites. Marvellous ruins but beaches marred by plastic objects, activist women, the Vrisoules, who dance to protest against oil and gas exploration and disillusioned Arcadian shepherds who want to go home. This is the most fantastic travel book I’ve read, although I’m not sure I’ve ever really read a travel book, but this one makes you want to pick up your Greek mythology books and take a trip to Greece.
“In other words, as Nietzsche once wrote, it is HOPE that is going to kill us. Zeus’ punishment, the last and cruellest of them all. Of course, this may be what all humans have always thought, that they are living on the edge of the apocalypse, but I don’t believe it. I think this deep knowledge of imminent ecological collapse is something new, and we cannot bring ourselves to look it in the face … but it seems that I (like you) also suffer from ‘optimism bias’. Because why else would we carry on doing the things that we do ?
Perhaps it is time to stop looking for hope.”