I've been here in Zürich for a bit over a day now... a small apartment up in Asylstraße (Asylum Street – yeah yeah very funny I know). Very, very pleasant to have a small apartment, as opposed to the small hotel rooms without baths or kitchens I've taken for the past two years – and not much more expensive (three and a half weeks here is about £200 more than three weeks in a tiny guest-house room in Küsnacht). Although the cars in the street make a bit more noise getting up the hillside, and it's done up in Late IKEA – which means: good design, shoddy workmanship; there are already minor things broken, and the landlord will have to replace most it within a couple of years. Ah well, it's good enough; and I do love having a kitchen (saves money too).
The warm weather means that the Swiss are, on the one hand, tan, wearing loose and casual clothing, and being rather, well, sexy (a man on the tram rests his hand lightly on his wife's very lowest back); but, on the other hand, they still don't smile. Solemn to the point of being grim.
Which reminds me of something I was thinking last year... how does the general style of this city relate to Jung's concerns and ideas? Because obviously late 19th-century Vienna, with its overblown, self-indulgent eroticism and general neurotic fragmentation as the center of a disintegrating empire, is a major source for Freud's focus on sexuality, plus his insistence on rigidly controlling the analytic context. And people have talked for a long time about Jung's childhood in country towns and in eerily archaic Basel (I spent some time there in the late 1990s) as significant contributors to his ideas – intense Protestantism, layers of ancient and peasant cultures invading an apparently civilized landscape, and the sense of vast, hidden, mysterious roots growing under everything.
But Zürich, where he spent much of his adult life, is a banker's city: neat, cosmopolitan, orderly, a bit heartless – sort of like a very carefully designed fun park, that is actually slightly lifeless, with no real fun in it – none of which sounds even faintly like Jung, or his writings. Perhaps he was enough of an introvert that he simply ignored all that (which accounts for the pseudo-medieval stone house he built in Bollingen, I suppose); but I can't help but wonder if I'm missing something....
But it is evening; I've had some good rich rye bread, with solid cheese and meat; and must write up a summary of the love story in Gottfried's Tristan for tomorrow's seminar. The Swiss can, as they have infallibly reminded everyone throughout their history, take care of themselves.
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