Swiss Sojourn 2
II. Martin’s Place
The second installment of my Swiss journal (first one here) tells of the man who put me up when I first arrived, a fellow student and intense hacker dude.
Before coming to study in Zürich, my chairman arranged for me to lodge at first with fellow grad student Martin H. It was a big relief not to have to scramble for accommodations as soon as I touched down, and I really appreciated his taking me in. He found me at the airport (actually, I spotted him first, his untamed hair and handlebar mustache still as bushy as when we first met five years ago) displaying a crudely lettered cardboard sign saying “Welcome Geoff Dutton” that I kept as a souvenir.
I had just trudged out of customs trundling a cart loaded with 200 pounds of belongings, which the bored customs officer mercifully did not ask me to open for inspection. We somehow stuffed everything into his compact car and 15 minutes hence arrived at his house in Seebach, perched atop a steep hill in a confusing maze of cobbled streets. Besides the convenient distance from Flughaven Airport, he noted, we were situated not far from the Oerlikon train station and a quick tram ride to the campus in Irchel. I felt very lagged, but with Martin’s help managed to haul my stuff up four flights of stairs before collapsing in a heap for several hours, sinking into the duvet plumping the narrow Swiss bed on which I would sleep for the next three weeks.
Martin lives by himself on the second floor of the house in a four-room apartment that’s spacious by Swiss standards. The house belonged to his grandfather, and is also occupied by an aunt who lives on the first level. The third floor is rented out to a working woman who isn’t around much. I was relegated to a rustic garret tucked under the eaves with a sewing room, bedroom, and a parlor of sorts. My digs were heated, and featured a sink but no other amenities, so I would bathe and squat downstairs in Martin’s pad.
Martin is a bachelor hacker but his flat isn’t quite as unkempt as that might connote. It’s decorated with large abstract computer graphic drawings and several photos taken in caves (he’s an enthusiastic spelunker who codes and distributes software for mapping caves). His dining room features shelves full of computer and cooking books, carefully organized, and dozens of polyhedral puzzles and models of mathematical solids mystically arranged to contemplate. Then there are the mounds of books, computer gear, computer manuals, and clothing accreting like stalagmites he occasionally rummages through.
We share a number of interests, Martin and I. He was part of the reason that I decided to come to Zürich to pursue geographic studies. Like him, I am fascinated by polyhedra, particularly one (the mystical octahedron) that I aimed to base my doctoral research on. We also are both mycophiles who love to pick edible mushrooms, although we never managed to forage together. (I suspect he was being secretive about his picking sites.) And of course, we both code. While I’m just a journeyman programmer, Martin’s a true wizard and a font of coding arcana for fellow students and researchers and the European Mac community. We also both enjoy cooking. He lets me use his kitchen, but his impressive library of cookbooks, unfortunately, are mostly in German.
Martin gave me a warm welcome and made me feel at home. For the first two days, he cooked supper for us, preparing local delicacies such as fleisch-kase (a kind of meat loaf) and hobelkase (an aged cheese like parmagan that must be sliced wafer-thin to eat). Once I shook off my old time zone, I started cooking for him, exposing him to American goodies I had smuggled past the bored customs official in a big canvas bag.
But as days passed, I found myself eating dinner alone more often. Martin was there, but had nibbled on something earlier and gone back into his den, to resume command of Starship Quadra (his Macintosh system). Every now and then he would emerge to chat, but often seemed distracted, and told me that he was deep into coding a new release of TopoRobot (his cave mapping program) and preparing demos for an open house at school, and one or more other digital deadlines. I understood: From personal experience I knew the quest for code perfection stretches to infinity, and how absorption with taming the beasts I begot tended to diminish my social life and corrupt my diet.
But despite all our similar interests, Martin and I hardly socialized once I moved out. Part of that was our hackerish ways. Another part was our essential introversion, topped off for him with that guarded privacy the Swiss wield to fend off foreigners. For my part, a lack of German and especially the indecipherable Switzerdeutsch dialect made me shy to approach strangers. Against all odds, though, certain Swiss did approach me and some became fond friends who invited me to visit and travel with them.
But not Martin. A pity, because ever since we met I felt that he and I were fellow travelers in a land that few others truly inhabited. My intuition told me we would meet again to somehow bind, join forces, and lead each other across arches of imagination to a platonic landscape of form and function that we’d apply for the betterment of humankind. That meeting was at a geospatial data symposium in Zürich in 1990, in his fifth year of doctoral research in digital geography. At this writing he still hasn’t picked up a degree and seems no closer to getting it now than then. He keeps himself useful by leading a research project on digital terrain modeling to which I am nominally attached. He also teaches a course to the Diploma (Masters) students, a workshop in computer mapping that he conducts in the MacLab, a classroom equipped with a dozen PowerPC Macintosh workstations that he and other Doktoranden have set up, equipped with software, and lovingly maintain.
With all his outside interests and academic responsibilities, it doesn’t surprise that Martin has made such halting progress in his Doktorarbeit. But ten years is a lot to devote to any project, even part-time. I can attest to that, because I have been on the trail of mine on and off for even longer, albeit off and on. But I am not convinced that Martin will finish his, or that he even wants to anymore. He seems weary, not from lack of sleep, but by virtue of slogging through the sands of time without a clear concept of where he is going, how he will recognize it when he gets there, or whether that destination will be its own reward.
My impulse is to help him get on with it, but I feel too much the interloper here and similarly vulnerable to Doktorarbeiter angst to be able to offer him any useful guidance. Another grad student — who is also having trouble pushing ahead — told me it happens to everyone here. Conspiratorially, he said that one can expect to have crises of confidence after the first six months in the program and then again a year later. That would be in March of ’96 and ’97 in my case. I imagine that after that, the funk comes less frequently but gets deeper. So far, I’ve found myself doubting the feasibility of my project on about four occasions, but only for a few hours each time. We’ll see.
Remember who said Arbeit macht frei. Is work really liberating, or does it, for Martin, myself, and our fellow grad students, chain us to machinery we are feckless without?
Next: The Campus on the Hill
