Swiss Sojourn
I. What Am I Doing Here?
This fragment of a memoir kicked off a journal I kept haphazardly after I exiled myself to Switzerland. I kept the journal between between 1995 and 1998, and more or less under wraps until now. Since second chances don’t come all that often and, as a major transition for my family looms, I felt I should dust it off to see what it still has to offer. I’ve edited it for style and to provide some context, but not substantially.
Around when I was approaching puberty, I used to browse a book my parents had of cartoons by Abner Dean. The drawings were captioned, and depicted people in surreal, dreamlike situations pondering heavy existential dilemmas. The people were all white, mostly well kempt, and quite ordinary in appearance other than the fact that all were stark naked, which shocked but mainly titillated (starts with tit, after all) my pre-pubescent sensibilities. They also lacked genitalia, which disappointed me and struck me as a cop-out. I now realize that this 1947 book was ahead of its time, quite daring even without pubes.
Although some of the existential predicaments etched in the book didn’t make sense to my juvenile brain and just seemed silly, enough of them did to give me a sense that these despairing scenes limned a darkness that someday I might understand. Who was this Dean guy, I wondered, and why is he drawing cartoons that aren’t very funny?
The book — and several of its drawings — had the title What Am I Doing Here?, (recently republished) which of late has proved to be an interesting question for me, as tough to answer as it is silly to ask. If you think I’m kidding, ask yourself this question five times, stressing a different word each time: WHAT am i doing here? What AM i doing here? What am I doing here? What am i DOING here? What am i doing HERE? No matter what your circumstances may be, they are probably pretty good questions to ask yourself, all different in important ways, and all important in different ways.
I write this on a 1994-vintage Apple laptop on a second-hand table in in my subsidized studio apartment on Öerlikonerstrasse, having recently decamped from Boston, USA to Zürich, Switzerland. My purpose in coming here wasn’t to launch a career as a memoirist, but my expatriation felt like such a radical act that I needed a journal in which to capture the foreignness of this tidy little country before it becomes ordinary and fades before my jaded eyes. And so, when the muse strikes, I’ll drop my dissertation research long enough to digest the strangeness of it all and dump it into this document.
Anyway, the five questions. While some may be easier to answer than others, I bet you can’t answer any in 50 words or less. At least I doubt I can. But I’ll try.
· WHAT am i doing here? This is the easy one. I’m developing a theory about geographic space into software that people might eventually have a use for, and will probably get a Ph.D. from the University of Zürich whether I succeed or fail.
· What AM i doing here? I am pursuing my dreams. Not only a of a theory, but also of a life that is richer, more rewarding that hopefully I will not regret having spent someday.
· What am I doing here? I am challenging myself to put up or shut up about my theory, by plunging into it and into an alien environment that is both hospitable and indifferent to my success or failure.
· What am i DOING here? Working like mad, but also at my own pace, taking time to check out my environs, but keeping pretty much to myself. People tell me I should also be learning German, but that will happen in due course. Or not. Almost everyone at university speaks English, some better than I do, and I’m not coding in C I’ll be writing about it in English.
· What am I doing HERE? No other university wanted me enough to offer to support me, and I like the people at this one. Switzerland, and Europe in general, appeal to me right now, not only professionally, but because I have gotten pretty damn sour about America and how my shiftless my life had become there, and so said the hell with it.
And so, What am i doing here NOW? It is time to change my life and grow again. I knew I needed something else several years ago, but didn’t find the courage until realized I was 50 and my life would stagnate if I didn’t pay attention to what was really important. Call it middle-age crisis, call it romantic delusions, call it ennui, but what else can one do when it takes that long to decide what he wants to do when he grows up?
Next: Martin’s House
