A good day at the Jung-Institut – the middle one of three hot days. Tess's writing seminar was very good – why in fact doesn't she do this for four hours a day for three weeks? that would work – and when people chose to read their work it included a man with a beautiful voice in Portuguese, a woman in Hungarian, and Spanish, Korean... some people translated, some preferred not to. And it honestly didn't matter: the sense of a beautiful and personal memory was arresting in each case.
And then another party with the Italians, plus a bunch of others: great fun. An outdoor barbecue – there's nothing like a mitteleuropäische butcher's to give you a lot of stuff to put on the grill – and people added a lot of their own touches right up to the chocolate, and we were there from seven until midnight (at which point I dragged Thomas away from Giovanni who was protesting that he was just about to put on more coffee, because, as I severely said, I'm old and tired and have a class in the morning).
The theme of languages kept drifting through the party, though in this group it was much more chaotic, more languages being used, more people having only certain languages and not others. A funny but rather smart-mouthed young Swiss girl told me what she thought of Americans who couldn't speak anything but English, to which I replied: so, exactly how good is your Romansh?...
That stopped her momentarily, enough for us to get talking a bit more friendlily about everything. It was interesting, in fact, when she noted that some of us were studying at the Jung-Institut; she said, á propos of nothing, well, I'm busy and perfectly satisfied and have lots of friends and I like Zürich and I like the idea of my work, but I am a little bored it's true. I told her to start keeping a notebook and writing – well, whatever seemed to come up...
When I finally got home, I was digging through my bag looking for my room key, past the two double bags of Weißwurst that they'd given me (left over from the barbecue), and I thought: thank God I'm not a Freudian, I'd never get through this door.
Oh Paul! Thank you for the trip! It tickled all (or some) of my senses, and brought bitter sweet nostalgia.
Posted by: Nomi Kluger-Nash | July 13, 2014 at 02:47 AM