What we didn’t do in Gstaad:
What we did do:
In writing about Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey, I can do no better than to try to emulate its directness. The book begins by describing the plunge of five people to their deaths when the renowned bridge of the book’s title collapses. The individuals’ lives are shaped by asymmetric, non-romantic love, powerful enough to confuse speech and thought. The Marquesa de Montemayor obsesses about her daughter, Dona Clara, sending monthly letters to her in Spain. Esteban becomes adrift when his twin brother Manuel dies of an infected wound. Uncle Pio’s genuine, fatherly generosity toward the Perichole eventually earns a share of her general mistrust.
The collapse of the bridge is a pure tragedy, as Brother Juniper concludes in a frame, because the Marquesa, Esteban, and Uncle Pio undertake freeing self-transformations immediately before. (The Marquesa’s servant Pepita and the Perichole’s son Jaime, the other two casualties, also face new hope.) Their deaths–and Brother Juniper’s at the stake–take on meaning in the realizations of those, still living, who they had loved.
Kingsley Amis’s Roger Micheldene is a poor English cousin to Ignatius Reilly. Though both are supremely bloated on themselves, Roger is more self-aware (perhaps, older, owing to more time away from overprotective maternal influence), and unapologetically lacking in the consolation of philosophy. Some might appreciate One Fat Englishman for its charms, but for humor I’d say skip it in favor of rereads of Wodehouse, and for singular, hysterical experience John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces is supreme.
Nestled among Alpine foothills, the village of Gstaad has gorgeous, classically Swiss views. From our (southern) side of the village, the Eggli rises in the right foreground and the Wispile in the left, and our view extends along the valley toward Gsteig. On a slightly clearer day, the Oldenhorn would be visible beyond, perhaps along with Les Diablerets. Sturdy old wooden chalets, with meticulous ornamentation and red tile roofs, dot the verdant hills, with bright shutters and overflowing flowerboxes glossing their upper stories.
The Promenade of the village, just the other side of the River Saane, is far too posh to be kitschy. To the life-size, bronze and steel animal sculptures that are ubiquitous here, I far prefer the real things, which played me a cowbell symphony on my run this morning. Tasty fresh vegetables are hard to come by– presumably because everyone here is wise enough to save their stomachs for local bread and cheese. (Every town justly takes pride in its own smelly mountains.)
On an equally happy side note, our entry point to the region yesterday was Spiez, from where we saw dozens of sailboats rightly gliding in the unseasonably warm, Indian summer afternoon, outward into the blue.
“I’ll tell you now, quiet. In a bitter night, a mustard night that was last night, a good thought came and the dark was sweetened when the day sat down. And this thought went from evening star to the late dipper on the edge of the first light–that our betters spoke of. So I invite myself.” –Samuel Hamilton
