Happy mid-July, to all my books & breakfasters. It’s truly mid-summer and the scorching heat is blowing onto T.O., though we’ve luckily been spared compared to everyone out in Europe. It’s funny to think of myself moving to Geneva, Switzerland exactly two years ago, mid-pandemic with all my foreseeable contracts cancelled/postponed and taking a chance on a new country and life.
Sometimes as I walk around Toronto these days, I experience random flashes of my life in Geneva and feel an enormous sense of loss to have left it so suddenly. It’s surreal to become so familiar with a place and landscape and then leave it, hurtled across the ocean. As F. Scott Fitzgerald describes in Tender is the Night, a novel filled with descriptions of healing and love and mental illness in Switzerland, “Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.”
This short newsletter will be my moment of retracing a few Swiss steps, if you’ll indulge me. :)
Although Geneva wasn’t exactly my vibe as far as European cities go (I much preferred living in bustling Vienna, with its thriving classical music scene, counterculture and people of all nationalities and faiths), there was a calmness I loved about living in Switzerland. My apartment overlooked Lac Léman and the green Jura mountains, and every morning I’d wake early and do my Morning Pages while drinking strong coffee and meditating as the sun rose. I grew to love many neighbourhood spots in my quartier of Eaux-Vives, including Chou, a café downstairs with the milkiest lattes and creamiest profiteroles, Gelatomania for Speculoos ice cream, Bains des Paquis across the lake for community saunas, concerts and outdoor fondue, the slow, yellow Mouettes that could take you back and forth across the lake, and the many stunningly kept parks where I’d walk friends’ dogs or nanny for fellow expats’ children.
I think Nicole Krauss (one of my favourite authors) described Geneva best in her short story, “Switzerland:”
“That Switzerland—neutral, alpine, orderly—has the best institute for trauma in the world seems paradoxical. The whole country had, back then, the atmosphere of a sanatorium or an asylum. Instead of padded walls it had the snow, which muffled and softened everything, until after so many centuries the Swiss just went about instinctively muffling themselves. Or that was the point: a country singularly obsessed with controlled reserve and conformity, with engineering watches, with the promptness of trains, would, it follows, have an advantage in the emergency of a body smashed to pieces.”
I’ll be back soon with some regularly scheduled programming. :)
Sara