Tokyo-Berne

There is no greater relief than to be off the packed plane and into a warm, balmy, summer day at the main station in Zürich. As the train pulls out of the station, I listen to Beethoven’s Rasumovsky quartet and everything seems just right, as if the twisted wheels of a complex mechanism had suddenly sprung into place and clicked. Even the war-related newspaper headlines in front of one’s very eyes seem very far away and a quick glance out of the window over the summery landscape of golden corn fields will reassure you that this is what’s real and what matters and that everything unpleasant is remotely removed. As if under Sylvia Plath’s bell jar were a place where you actually could breathe.