Alexis Zorba, protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek, is tall, well into his sixties, and throws himself to the mercy of the perfect democracy of his appetites. He drinks until the bottle is empty, fights when fighting is called for, makes love to the aging cabaret singer Madame Hortense with full theatrical devotion, and weeps without shame. He imposes himself on the narrative the way a strong wind imposes itself on a still afternoon. He has been a Macedonian rebel, a soldier, a miner, a sailor, a potter, a peddler, a bandit. He has fought Turks and Bulgarians and confesses, without sentimentality, to atrocities that still wake him at night.

 The narrator, a bookish young Greek intellectual, travels to Crete to finish a manuscript on the Buddha in peace. During his travels, he meets and hires Zorba to help him reopen a lignite mine on the island. Their encounter sparks a friendship that gradually dismantles the young scholar's intellectual restraint by introducing him to Zorba’s wholehearted embrace of the present. When the elaborate cable-car system that our protagonist constructs collapses spectacularly on its first run, scattering timber and ruining the venture, he does not curse fate or apologise. He laughs, lays out roast lamb and wine on the beach, and starts dancing. This very dance is the novel’s recurring miracle. When Zorba dances, piece by piece he tears down the inner administrator of reason.

He threw himself into the dance, making tremendous bounds into the air, as if he wished to conquer the laws of nature and fly away. His face had assumed an alarming severity. He was endeavouring to attain the impossible. "Zorba! Zorba!" I shouted. "That's enough!" I was afraid that his old body would not stand up to such violence and might be shattered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the four winds of heaven.

Every leap into the air is an assassination attempt on the small, sensible voice of self-preservation. And for the duration of the dance, he always wins. He becomes, by turns, a bird, a fish, a lion, a cat, a stray dog. What Zorba is telling us is that excessive consciousness inhibits Life. In The Birth of the Tragedy, Nietzsche presents the Apollonian as order, reason, and restraint, and the Dionysian as ecstasy, instinct, and risk. While the Apollonian protects against disaster, it does so at the cost of paralysis. To catch sight of a beautiful stranger across the room, and to actually rise and cross the floor to speak to them requires demolishing the self that knows the odds and that has rehearsed the rejection. These acts of courage are built out of these private acts of Dionysian destruction against the “small conscious self”, the inner authority that never finally surrenders and must therefore be defeated again tomorrow.