The Inflection Point

Since his younger days, he believed that life was a series of inflection points. He didn’t remember if he had read this somewhere or had heard it from someone, but the idea – that life moved in one direction until there came a moment of dramatic transformation that changed life’s course into another direction, which went on until the next such inflection point, and so on – had caught his imagination very early and remained rooted in his mind. Over the years when no dramatic life-changing experience had occurred, he had at times wondered if this theory was true, but such moments of disbelief were rare and short-lived: the whole point about such dramatic changes, he told himself, was that they occurred after long periods of continuity where life seemed to go on endlessly, like a boat in the vast Pacific with only gentle waves and vacant skies all around, and when the point of inflection came, when the large island appeared out of nowhere, the magnitude of change had much to do with the length and steadfastness of the uneventful period one had just passed through. So it was nothing to worry about – the moment would come, and life would never be the same again.

There were events from his past that had seemed life-changing: his first love, as a teenager; marriage, in his late twenties; divorce, a few years later. But these had been phases where a surfeit of emotions created an illusion of a change that promised new directions; in reality they were nothing but temporary dislocations, small blips in the unwavering trajectory of life.

He was thinking about all this again, seated in a flight to Delhi, and he didn’t quite understand why these thoughts had popped up now. Was it because life over the last months had seemed purposeless and he badly desired change, or was it that he had just felt the faint yet clear stirrings of change? He could not determine which, so he decided to ask Anita – seated next to him, leafing through a glossy in-flight magazine – where her thoughts on this matter of life-changing events lay.

‘I have this theory,’ he told her, ‘that life is nothing but one inflection point followed by another.’

* * *

He had met Anita at Mumbai airport. After check-in, he was seated in the departure lounge when the lady in the adjacent seat had turned to him: ‘Excuse me – I somehow cannot figure how to fix this to my handbag. Could you help me, please?’ She held out the baggage tag every passenger had to attach to cabin luggage items.

He took the tag from her, and with a slow, deliberate movement showed her how to turn it over a strap and then take the tag through the elastic loop.

‘Thank you!’ she said. ‘I never knew it was so simple.’

‘It’s one of those things which, once you know how it’s done, makes you wonder why on earth you couldn’t figure out yourselves.’ he said.

‘Like a Sherlock Holmes mystery,’ she replied. ‘I always felt foolish at the end of each one, when Holmes explained the details to Watson and everything seemed so obvious.’

‘That had a lot to do with the author,’ he said. ‘Arthur Conan Doyle revealed much less to the reader than what Holmes could observe – so the reader was always at a disadvantage.’

‘But it had its impact – there was the Wow! effect at the end.’

‘Yes, I have to admit that.’

She brought out a pen and began to write her particulars on the baggage tag. She had short hair, wore a plain white shirt over deep-blue jeans, and had a thin, beaded necklace strung close to her neck – he would later think of her appearance as “simple yet elegant”. Her features were Indian but he found her accent difficult to place. A leather strap hung over her shoulder held a small camera – it was a model he recognized.

‘Is that a Leica?’ he asked, pointing at the camera.

‘Yes it is,’ she said. ‘But Leica isn’t a brand everyone knows about.’ There was a hint of curiosity in the way she raised her eyebrows.

‘My brother was interested in photography,’ he explained. ‘He always dreamed of acquiring a Leica someday. He would show me pictures of a small, black camera – it looked more like those automatic ones that Japanese tourists carry, than any bigger models one sees with professional photo-journalists – and he would explain that it was the M7 model of Leica, his “ultimate dream”. But it was too expensive – beyond the reach of what his amateur interests could justify.’

‘It is a very good camera, and an expensive one, yes. Meant for professional photographers’ she said, and added: ‘Or for someone rich enough to indulge in such gadgets.’

‘So which one are you?’

She laughed: ‘The poor professional, you could say.’

The next hour went by in a flash. When he learned that Anita was a photographer living in Geneva, his own work – in a leading accounting firm in Delhi – seemed commonplace. But they shared other interests – literature being one – and her life as a photographer was full of “strange experiences” she was willing to talk about. When boarding announcement came – a little too soon, he thought – they both said their goodbyes and parted. But as luck would have it, they ended up on adjacent seats in the airplane.

* * *

When he told her about his belief in life’s inflection points, at first she smiled but didn’t say anything. Then she stared at the patterns on the back of the seat ahead, as if trying to remember something from a distant past. Was she trying to recollect events that had changed her life? Were there any?

‘I want to tell you about an incident that occurred many years ago, while I was still at college.’ she said finally, and continued without waiting for a response. And when she spoke it did not feel as if she was addressing him – it was more like she was reading aloud from a book.

‘We used to go on a lot of hikes those days – Switzerland is full of walking opportunities. We were a group of four girls, and on such weekends we would leave early on a Saturday morning and drive to the mountains. Brigitte had a car and she took the lead, deciding on the destination and planning the trip. Ulrike was the expert in flora and fauna – she had gathered a large collection of wild flowers from different regions of the world – and she always carried with her a notebook and a bag for gathering specimens. I was the photographer, lugging along my assortment of lenses despite a “rule” from Brigitte that we travel light. And Florence, the beautiful, delicate and moody Flo, was just interested in walking, wandering.

‘On this particular Saturday we were headed towards the southern branch of the Jura mountains, near Lausanne. It was early summer, and the day – sunny, with a mild breeze – seemed perfect for hiking. We reached the town where our hike was supposed to begin, parked the car and removed our bags. The town was next to a lake with low hills in the distance. The sun was already above the hills, which made the lake sparkle like a large silver foil and the hills – shaped like a woman sleeping on her side – appear as a dark silhouette. From that first view itself I had a strange feeling about the place, but I couldn’t pinpoint why.

Lake

‘We began walking, first next to the railway line and then on a track that led uphill. Brigitte led the way, as usual, and we followed, pausing occasionally when Uli – that’s what we called Ulrike – found a plant or weed that interested her. The path led us through the hillside full of pines, and it was only us on that path, which was very unusual: our paths always crossed with those of other walkers, unless the weather was bad or the hiking route was remote and unknown. I mentioned this to the others; Brigitte dismissed it with a grunt, Uli was too busy examining some creepers nearby, and Flo simply kept walking, looking dreamily at patches of blue sky between branches of pine.

‘A little ahead Uli called out to me, and pointed to a flower nearby. “That’s the Glacial Buttercup,” she said. “An alpine wild flower found only above 2000 meters. But we are hardly at 1000 meters.” What does that mean, I asked her, but she simply shrugged her shoulders and carefully plucked a specimen for her collection.

‘After about two hours we reached the ridge that led to the other side. The view was spectacular: there was a sheer drop that led to a small lake, beyond which there were meadows and small clusters of cottages, and higher mountains in the distance. We stopped there for a while; I took pictures. For those few moments the uneasiness that was with me since morning vanished. But the respite, as I was to learn shortly, was temporary.’

‘Tea or Coffee for you, sir?’ the flight attendant asked.

‘No, thank you,’ he replied. He wished no interruptions at this point.

Anita looked at him with a mischievous smile: ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m quite sure. Do continue.’

‘So where was I? At the ridge, yes….we climbed down and took a path that wound across the lake.Lepont Once again the path was deserted, and although we saw cottages – typical lakeside vacation villas – they all seemed uninhabited. Along the way I saw a sign that said “Le Pont – 2 Km”. It was placed next to the highway that ran for a while alongside the path we were on, but we never saw any vehicles. I
wondered what “Le Pont” meant – I lived in the German part of Switzerland and my French was very poor – and somehow decided that it referred to “The Point”. But what kind of point was it? A viewpoint, with beautiful views of the surrounding landscape? Or something else? The phrase “turning point” came to mind, but what did it mean? Was it a turning point for all who came this way?

‘We chose a small area next to the lake to stop for lunch. There were two wooden planks arranged on tyres, and although they looked clean I found their presence a bit odd as such picnic spots usually had benches and tables. I pointed this to Flo, who was looking at the cottage facing us. She ignored what I had just said, and replied: “We should go and check out that cottage.”

‘The cottage was a small single-storey house. All windows had their shutters down, and the lower half of the house was obscured by bushes and tall stalks of dry grass – it was an abandoned place. Towering behind the cottage there stood three pine trees in equal distances from one another, like tall sentries standing in guard. I didn’t like the place. I suggested we find another spot, but the others had settled down and were too hungry to move. So we sat there and ate our sandwiches and all the while Flo kept her eyes on the cottage like someone in the hypnotic trance. “We should see what’s in there,” she kept saying, and Brigitte made fun of her: “Do you expect a hidden treasure or something?!”’

Cottage

The flight captain’s voice came over the speaker, announcing the landing and requesting passengers to fasten seat belts. There was a momentary rustle as passengers moved to check their belts and push up their seats. He looked out of the window and saw the outlines of a city emerge in the form of orange, flickering lights. They would soon reach their destination, but Anita’s account didn’t seem close to an end. Where was all this leading to?

‘When it was time to leave, Flo insisted we take a look at the cottage. I didn’t like the idea at all, but the others thought it wouldn’t hurt so we took a path that led us to the back of the house, to a door that seemed not to have been opened for years. There was a window next to the door, and this one did not have its shutters down. We tried to look in through the glass, but it was too dark inside. Ulrike, who was more interested in the vegetation surrounding the cottage, was wandering among the grass when she let out a cry: “Look! I found something!” We quickly gathered around her and looked at the object in her hand: it was a wooden wheel with a raised dot near the edge.

‘It was an ordinary wheel – a child’s plaything, perhaps – at which one wouldn’t normally take a second look, but what kept us intrigued was its surface: it was so well polished and shiny that it obviously didn’t belong in these surroundings. Either someone had very recently dropped it here, or it had – by some magic – retained its shine and newness over a longer period. We turned it around and looked at the edges but could not see anything special – no marks or engravings, just a smooth surface with a dot two-thirds away from the centre. I turned the wheel along its periphery, and the dot moved, tracing an arc along the direction of the turn. At that instant the phrase came back: “a turning point”. I don’t know why I made this connection – I felt it was silly and did not mention it to anyone. By this time the others had lost interest in the wheel, so I kept it with me, in one of the lens pockets of my camera bag.’

The plane landed. They walked together towards the exit but the crowd and the surrounding noise did not leave them any space, so he thought of suggesting a cup of coffee nearby. But as he was about to do so she took out a card and scribbled a number on it.

‘That’s where you can reach me in Delhi,’ she said. ‘I’m here for a few weeks, so call me and we’ll meet.’

At the exit, amongst the dozens of cards held up by people, there was one with her name; she walked towards it, and near the end of the stretch she turned around, met his eyes, and waved goodbye. Much later, when he would think back to this day, he would recognize that it had been a strange wave, a flourish that had the character of something final, of something that had ended.

* * *

He had waited for a few days to call her on that number; he didn’t want to seem too eager. Besides, he had sensed in her narration a deliberate tactic aimed towards increasing suspense and inducing a craving to know what happened next – he didn’t want to show he had fallen for it. She had said she was around for a few weeks, so learning how the incident had ended could wait a few days.

When he called the number a few days later, it was picked up by someone who replied that “Madam” had left for Europe the previous day. But she was supposed to be here for some weeks isn’t it? Yes, came the answer, the booking at the “guesthouse” had been for three weeks, but she had cancelled it. Was there some address she had left behind? No, they did not maintain such records.

In the days and weeks that followed, he kept going back to this brief encounter. He tried to reconstruct all pieces of her story, looking for clues that would explain this bizarre response to his theory. He remembered her remark about the Wow! effect in Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which perhaps indicated that she desired a similar effect for her story – but what was it? What lay at the end of that elaborate construction that was now left hanging without purpose?

Then there was the “turning point” she had mentioned, but beyond the obvious relation to his notion of inflection points it did not make any sense to him. On a whim, he looked for a translation of the phrase “Le Pont” – she had only guessed that it meant “The point”. The translation website spitted back its meaning in English: “The Bridge”.

He then remembered what she had said about photography during their chat at the Mumbai airport lounge.

‘A great photograph is like a bridge that leads you to another world,’ she had said. He thought about that for a while, and remarked that he had heard of photographs being called “windows to another world”, but never bridges. ‘A window implies distance, a detachment of the observer from the observed,’ she had explained. ‘A bridge indicates a cross-over into that other world, at the end of which there is no separation of the observer from the observed. It demands effort, and great photographs act as bridges, easing the cross-over.’

* * *

Life, he thought to himself, is a series of bridges, each leading you to a world different from the previous.

Uncommon interactions

I was at the nearby Indian restaurant, the one I frequently visit, sipping from a glass of chilled lassi and turning the pages of a recent New Yorker. Most of the tables were unnoccupied – it was still early – and the R.D.Burman tunes coming through the speaker seemed louder than it usually did. I was unable to focus on the article; I looked out of the window, at the vacant street and the blue sky beyond. After a while a pair walked into the restaurant, an unusual pair that made all eyes turn towards them.

The woman – a short German with dark hair and a pair of slim spectacles balanced on a sharp nose – somehow seemed familiar; I must have seen her at office. She was helping the man – an Indian, blind, and carrying a stick – by holding his hand and directing him across the maze of tables and chairs. They settled down at a nearby table, and the woman began to flip through the menu, reading all the items: “Mulligatawny soup, cheese pakoras, onion rings….pappad…raita…chicken biryani…fish tikka….cheese chilli special…” He stopped her at a couple of places, considered the dish for a while, asked if a variant was available (“something with Paneer?”). She went through the list meticulously, reading the sub-text of some exotic dishes if the name wasn’t self explanatory. The conversation seemed louder than most usual conversations – it was as if one had to speak up to compensate for the missing visual element in the interaction.

When they had decided, they gave their respective orders (she spoke in German while giving her’s : “Ich hätte gerne…” – typical for a German to revert to the native tongue at the smallest opportunity). From bits of the conversation that followed I could gather that he was new to the place, and they were not yet familiar with each other. The woman kept looking at his eyes from time to time, like any ordinary couple would do, and it made me wonder if familiarity with a blind person would lead us to stop looking at the eyes altogether, and instead focus completely on the voice, and learn to communicate different moods through voice: the smile, the affection, the sympathy, the anger. Without such audio cues, how difficult it must be for the blind to get an impression of the other person’s thoughts? Perhaps it wasn’t too difficult, because we do offer – unconsiously – such cues all the time?

My attempts at trying to observe and listen to their interaction were short-lived: soon the place filled up, blocking not just my line of vision but also filling the air with the buzz of a busy restaurant. But my mind kept going back to them, to this dimension of interaction that I had never given any thought before.

Week and Weekend

The days are warm. He walks each day to work, is back by seven – which is early, going by his normal schedule – and spends most of the evening reading Sacred Games. He is taking it slowly – a book seven years in writing deserves seven weeks of reading – and is enjoying each scene, every encounter, the texture of each memory, the sting of every gaali.

He cooks his usual rice meal – vegetable pulao – which he eats with pickle and yoghurt, taking in the exploits of Gaitonde between spoons of rice and pickle, unable to decide where the feeling of spice originates from: the food or the book.

He likes this life, this solitude. He likes the empty house in a silent neighbourhood where he can spend his evenings reading, contemplating, dreaming. When he speaks with his wife on the phone, he mentions how much he loves being alone. Then don’t come this weekend, she says, pretending to be upset. He laughs, and says weekends are for her – he needs only the week for himself. Then you do not want me back? she asks; you do not want to spend the weeks with me?. He laughs again.

Moleskine
Late in the night, before sleeping, he jots into his journal some events of the day. He has been doing this regularly since he acquired a Moleskine notebook recently. He likes the growing collection of pages full of memories, and he often goes back to the previous entries. What is this journal, and what is that other one online? Why does one person need two? Both are needed, he tells himself, because there are really two selves. One that wishes to be alone, and one that wants to reach out to the world and participate in it. One for the week, the other for the weekend.

The puppet collector’s wife

“What you see here is only a small part of the collection,” she said. “We have around forty thousand artifacts, collected over a period of twenty years. My husband was a cameraman for a TV company, and he collected puppets from the different countries he visited while filming documentaries.”

The collection we had just seen at the Luebeck Puppet Museum was, in itself, significant: spanning three floors and around twenty rooms, there were around a thousand puppets from three continents covering different time-periods. To think that this was less than five percent of their collection was a bit mind-boggling. Do you rotate the collection? I asked.

“No,” she replied. “There are just the two of us – my husband and I – managing this place. And maintenance is such a difficult thing. The wood these puppets are made up of require a lot of care. We’re looking for sponsors, to help us manage this collection. Perhaps the company you work for might like to help? Big companies have a lot of money, you know.”

She was an Indian, a Malayali with expressive eyes and the smile of a classical dancer. She had been living in Germany for 20 years now. Her husband, the puppet collector, was an elderly German with the air of a distracted professor; he greeted us with a Namaste and told my Wife he knew she was from Kerala the moment he saw her.

We had first met the lady the previous day, when we entered the museum to ask directions to a hotel. She had switched to Malayalam the instant she learned my Wife was from Kerala: “Per enda?” she asked both Wife and me, and introduced herself as “Saras”. When she gave directions to the the hotel she said: “Tell them that you are from the museum, that I sent you there”. And she asked us to come back the next day, to visit her and see the museum.

The next afternoon, before we visited the museum, we went for a show at the Puppet Theater nearby. It was a small, cosy theater, and was almost full when we entered, mostly with children and a few parents who sat like tall, silent posts next to the bobbing, noisy heads all around them. The puppeteers entered a little later than the announced time, and some kids replied to their welcome with a definitive “Endlich!” (“Finally!”), which took the puppeteers by surprise and prompted them to offer reasons for the delay. Then they asked if anyone in the audience was celebrating a birthday on that day; three hands went up, and these three were asked to come forward to receive a nicely-wrapped gift. The play being staged was the Princess and the Pea, and all hands went up when the children were asked if they had read the story. Some started reciting lines from it, and it took a while before order was restored and the play could begin.

L1010461

It was not one of those string-based puppet shows, but one where the puppeteers wore gloves and moved the puppets around, giving voice to them, in full view of the audience. So it took a while to focus on the wooden figures and not get distracted by the human forms moving them around. The children didn’t appear to have this problem: the giggled and laughed at the right places, and seemed enchanted throughout.

After the show we walked to the museum in the building a little down the street, and Saras welcomed us with a warm hug. When we told her we’d just been to the puppet show, she came out with a flurry of questions: Was it good? How big was the audience? Was it a marionette puppet show, or the glove one? It turned out that the theater had once belonged to her husband’s parents, and had recently been sold to another group who was now managing the place. She then asked us to look around the museum, but refused the entrance fees.

The diverse collection, the result of one man’s passion, had me spellbound. The similarity behind different branches of this art form that had sprung up independently in different corners of the world was striking. The collection reminded me of an exhibition I had attended in Lausanne about an year ago: it was a small sample of artifacts from Nek Chand, another collector of sorts who had devoted a few decades of his life into gathering waste material and creating life-size figures and illegally planting them around a vast area of a forest, and in the end had created a collection so vast and spectacular that when it was discovered the government decided to turn the illegally-used stretch of land into a national park and appointed Nek Chand its Director. The power of years of focused work – be it nature’s or that of man – is immense. This comes to mind also when I see images of the Grand Canyon.

After we got back to the reception, Saras invited us for a chat and offered tea and biscuits. This room, partly a shop with puppets for sale and partly a cafeteria with long wooden benches and tables, had wooden figures hanging on walls and pillars, posters of puppet-shows probably a hundred years old, and paintings depicting stories.

Puppets

Saras spoke to us about how she met her husband (“I was in Hamburg at that time, running around like a frog, when Fritz met me”), and how she discontinued her interest in classical dance to devote herself to her husband’s passion (“one needs to make sacrifices”). She spoke about her daughter, about her wedding to a Finn that took place in India (“We had around forty people from Finland flying into India for the wedding”). She expressed her concern about the museum’s collection and its management, well beyond their lives (“We’ve created a foundation and after us everything will go to this foundation, and not to my daughter who may decide to sell it. We want to ensure that this remains in the hands of those who will continue to care for it.”) . When asked about the attendance and the interest of people in the museum, she said it was going down (“People have less money these days; we’ve begun to notice this especially since the last few years.”). She asked us if we could put up some posters of the museum at our workplace, and packed some pamphlets for us to distribute.

When we left, she bid goodbye by kissing us on the cheek. Sensing my hesitation (I am yet to get used to the intimacy of this gesture) she smiled and said “This is how people greet each other here, and I’ve learned their ways.”

Living in two places

I’ve often wondered what it is like to live in two places. This condition seems common among authors: on the back-cover of a book one finds, every now and then, a description of someone who “lives in New Delhi and London” or “divides her time between New York and Paris”. What sort of a life is it, dividing time between two societies, two cultures, two groups of people? What does one gain, and at what cost? I never thought I’d be rich enough to afford a life like that, but life is strange: it answers your wishes in ways you could hardly imagine.

Since about an year and half I have been, in a way, living in two places. On weekdays I’m in my town, south of Germany; on weekends – many, if not all – I travel to where Wife lives. Last year, when she was at business school, the destination was Lausanne; this year, since she started working again, it’s been Brussels. The arrangement isn’t one bit like the authors I mentioned before: they probably have periods of extended stays in either location, a luxury I cannot afford. My experience has been mixed, and has involved plenty of travel, diversity and accumulation.

The idea of travel is mostly associated with business (traveling to a conference) or pleasure (traveling to the beach resort). The sort of travel I do on the weekends is neither; one could call it a mix between spousal obligation and a desire for change. There is little planning involved: on Friday evening I throw some essentials into a bag and start driving. Unless there’s a jam, it’s a five hour drive; I take a couple of breaks in between, to refill the tank, to have a coffee or simply to feel the wind outside. The music is almost never what’s on radio, but something consistent, long and complicated: like an opera or a classical concert piece. The onward journey is always better – the weekend is ahead – and what always strikes me on my way back is that where you are does not matter as much as which way you are going.

The change of place every other weekend does a lot of good. I live in what is often described, not without reason, as a “sleepy town” and Wife has – on both occasions – been a city dweller, where the pace of life is different, the people are different, the language is different: refreshing changes, and always welcome. Another home – a living space – opens new possibilities: in Brussels, Wife stays in a high-rise building, and I spend hours simply looking at the Brussels skyline….

Skyline

… and on occasion at neighbours picnicking on their rooftops.

Rooftop

A second home also serves as a base offering possibilities of further exploration, an advantage we are yet to make full use of in Brussels. From what little I’ve seen of the city so far, I think it merits the label of European Union’s capital: it seems to have a bit of everything, from elegance to squalor, a mix of old and new, people variously coloured and weather that changes before you can spell RAIN. The other day we walked into a street where a bazaar had sprung up, with all manner of old and used stuff displayed in stalls next to the footpath. A convenient way to get rid of unwanted house-hold goods, I thought.

Market

My mind at that moment was on something I had been pondering over for a while: a second home also means two of most things, including household “essentials” needed in any modern dwelling: TV, DVD player, Washing Machine, Vacuum Cleaner, Iron Box, furniture of all sorts, Cutlery & Crockery…. the list goes on. I often wonder what we would do with them once Wife and I begin to live together again. The big items can be sold, but my concern lies behind the small things we accumulate but rarely need: my own apartment is full of such things that have somehow managed to slip into the house over the last six years, and I shudder to imagine the prospect of bringing that lot together with all of what Wife would have picked up at her apartment over the next year(s). To make matters worse, the influx has grown after we’ve setup two homes: in order to avoid carrying along things from one house to another each weekend, we’ve duplicated many things in both apartments; I now have two toothbrushes, two shaving kits, two home slippers, two sets of towels…

In a way, I’ve only just begun. There’s at least an year of this mode of living ahead of me, which means more travel, variety and accumulation. I’ll certainly have more to say on this topic after it all ends: one begins to understand the true nature of things only with time, and distance.

Snow

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We’ve had very little snow this year, which is a pity.  This picture, taken some weeks back on a drive to Brussels, is currently set as my desktop wallpaper.  Each morning when I login I am reminded how beautiful a snow-covered landscape is.  But what is gradually fading from memory is the texture of snow, and no picture can bring it back.

Familiarity

Hauptstrasse_1

Last evening I drove to Heidelberg. I’d spent the morning alone; Wife had moved to Brussels a couple of days ago, and I guess I wasn’t used to the emptiness yet, having spent the last two months together. The sun came out late afternoon, and the drive along B3 took me through empty meadows and clear views of the nearby hills. I parked at P4 and walked to the riverside. As always, the view was beautiful. I took some pictures from the bridge, and then walked along Hauptstrasse, stepping into every bookstore that came my way, to look at the English sections inside. As I walked the length of the street I found myself immersed in the surroundings: snatches of conversations in German, people dressed elegantly in various styles and shapes, bakeries with a warm glow within, trendy hairdressing saloons, expensive watch showrooms, the corner selling vintage signboards, the painter sketching portraits. At the end of it I felt as if I’d always be in love with this place – its gloss would never fade, it would never stop being interesting.

I couldn’t immediately explain why I felt that way. Perhaps it was because the foreignness of this place would always remain, because it was so different from the world I’d grown up in. The dullness that comes with familiarity had not set in, and I wondered if I’d ever feel so familiar with these surroundings as not to notice them.

Why had I not grown familiar with my surroundings? Since six years I’ve walked the same route to office through the cobble-stoned streets and corn fields and yet, last week as I was walking one morning along the same path observing the landscape partly obscured by mist, I felt that this was a view I had not experienced yet – there was a newness to it that I could attribute only to the weather: everything else was the same. The weather here induces dramatic changes in one’s environment – not just the landscape, but the clothes people wear, the cars they drive, the spring in their step and the hope in their voice – and that is one reason why one cannot easily grow too familiar with the surroundings.

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Actvity is another reason. It is a culture that encourages – and rewards – doing things, filling up your day with “life-enhancing” activities. A colleague I had lunch with the other day was telling me about his eleven year old daughter who was learning the piano, taking karate lessons, experimenting with drawing and using her spare time to create Power-point presentations. At work things have been mostly dynamic for me, and what little spare time I get quickly fills up with one activity or another. There is no time to feel bored and no cause to blame familiarity; six years have passed by in a flash.

Language perhaps plays a role as well. Although I can understand a fair amount of German, my expertise has not reached a level where I can understand it all and immerse myself fully into the culture. This keeps things unfamiliar, keeps me curious and puzzled.

Then there’s cross-cultural variety. Across the border people speak a tongue I cannot understand and do things that surprise me now and then; the architecture reveals new elements of aesthetics and engineering; the signs on the road take a while to get used to, and the traffic (in)discipline keeps me guessing; getting vegetarian food – asking for it – remains a challenge.

Fimu3

Even if I were to grow familiar with it all one day, Europe will not lose its charm. This strikes me while watching movies that show Europe in the previous decades, like Steven Spielberg’s Munich: the essence of that Europe of the Sixties and Seventies still remains, and will continue. I am unable to define what is behind that charm, what creates it; perhaps I shall take that topic another day.