Writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner heads to Switzerland, where she learns a lesson in Swiss serenity.
Switzerland's railways offer stunning surrounding views. The Jungfrau Railway, which connects the Bernese Highlands to the Valais, is one of the country's most-touristed routes. Photo by Chen Min Chun/Shutterstock.
There was a watch store on each city corner in . I walked into Tissot and looked at a silver timepiece with a diamond-crusted face. "But what does it do?" I asked the clerk. "It tells you the time," he answered politely, and I laughed and thought how charming and sweet that was, that a thing would be allowed to take up real estate on your body without also simultaneously taking a voicemail or counting your steps or buying your groceries. A few days later, I bought a Swatch, bright blue and orange, and it remains on my wrist, a quaint reminder of my trip, a quaint reminder that we may be permitted to do one thing at a time and still be considered valuable.
All countries will tell you clearly what they hold dear from the moment you arrive, if you're paying attention, and is no different: It's money and time that they are consumed with, like the rest of us, but without the layer of angst that, in much of the world, bears down on people short on those things. (For this story's purposes, I embody those "people.") The souvenir shop owners don't desperately bargain with you if you try to walk out. Nobody is rushing; everyone is well dressed. What you have is a country that lets you to catch your breath for a minute.
If you acquire money, and if you allow that money to buy you time, I encourage you to buy a ticket to Switzerland and use that time thusly: You should float aimlessly for hours in thermal baths at the top of a mountain, then have your battle-worn belly rubbed with hot oils by a woman whose touch transmits true, motherly love for you. You should dip pears into melted cheese at your leisure on the side of the Limmat River. You should drink a local Alpine beer under a canopy while the clouds sob down on you. You should let the daylight shine on you through the stained glass windows at Zurich's Fraumünster church, designed by Marc Chagall, tinting your face red and blue. You should wake up to a view of the river in a room that is decorated like Marie Antoinette's boudoir. You should eat chocolate that people made with their hands and let the person serving you tell you its history, because the care and the pride that went into that chocolate transformed it into something that contains a story, and when you swallow it, that story will become part of your cellular system as you digest it, and you will be the story, too, now. You will never truly be without the story again.
The gift of travel is to think about your life. The prison of travel is that your thoughts about your life remain in the country where you had them.
With your time you should go to a museum that's an hour away from Zurich, the in Winterthur, even though it will close in two and a half hours, because you know the transportation will run on time. You should look at the Cézannes and the Renoirs, and you should find, as I did, that in middle age you are no longer the person who rolled her eyes at framed Giverny posters from the Met in your friends' bedrooms, that you've finally gone soft and feline and you rather like the impressionists now. You may not take pictures in the Am Römerholz, and this will be your first lesson in how to use the time, to live inside it, to be more present in the moment and not worry about what it looks like to you later, to not be so obsessed with how to convey it all.
I saw Picassos in a collection at the in Lucerne, which holds dozens of them, along with photographs of the artist and some Klees and Modiglianis, too. At the in Zurich, I watched a thousand-year-old Chinese woman with a cane look at a Sisley for more than an hour, like maybe it was going to go somewhere if she didn't watch it, and I learned from her a new way to look at art—hard and for a long time—and I hope I don't forget it. I sat and looked at the same Sisley and thought maybe I should do something beautiful with my hands, maybe I should do something wordless. Maybe I'll take painting classes when I get home, or sculpture classes. Maybe I'll make tragic, reaching sculptures like Giacometti's, and everyone will say, Remember her? She was a writer, wasn't she? Did you know she is now also a very successful artist?
