Night. I’m sitting by the lake gripped by something I’m convinced we’ve all felt but rarely talk about, except some people call it God.

But before that. 24 hours in Zürich. A clean, stylish city. Strangely enough, while there, I found a lot of Swiss stereotypes to be true. My Airbnb host was a polite lithe twenty-something-year-old who worked, he told me with a degree of rye self-awareness, “in banking.” Plus, Swiss chocolate really is better — apparently this is because the cows graze on healthy pasture at high altitudes, thus producing less air-rated milk better for chocolate. And as one might expect of the country that proudly crafts ‘Swiss made’ watches, timekeeping was both an art and an obsession. The trains left precisely on the minute. In fact, in the main train station, there was one large clock that dictated the correct time, and any other clock that got ahead would waver an extra second before ticking over to the next minute to re-synchronize. If you were lucky, as I was, you were treated to the slight-but-unquestionable pause of the red, perfectly-vertical second-hand of a clock that had so erroneously strayed.

While in Zürich, I met up with an international friend of mine named Samia. We got coffee and explored the city a bit. I had already heard how clean Zürich was from my previous Airbnb host — apparently, people would bring water-tight bags with them to the office, change into swimming attire after work, put their work clothes in the bag, affix the bag to their bodies, jump into the river that runs through the city, and swim home. As a native of Philadelphia having grown up a stones-throw from the beautiful, lugubrious Schuylkill river where at times my dad and I would go futilely fishing for bottom feeders, I found this astounding.

How does a modern international city renowned for finance manage to stay so pristine? Part history (Switzerland has long-been pristine). Part-culture (Swiss pride in the landscape). And part concerted effort.

Over coffee, Samia told me about a friend of hers who had been staying in a hotel in Zürich. When he looked over the bill from the hotel, he noticed a charge for two francs (about two USD) for “air.”

He inquired about the charge.

“The charge is for breathing the air,” replied the well-dressed, slightly-bored, young fit concierge whose starched cummerbund required him to stand straighter than he usually would (here I take creative liberties).

The friend, understandably confused, asked for more details. It was explained to him that he was not Swiss, had come to Switzerland, and was breathing clean Swiss air, departing, and leaving behind worthless C02. Thus a small fee was appropriate.

Samia laughed. “Crazy, right?”

“Crazy,” I said.

We commiserated over the price of our coffee. Samia told me that the family she is working for drives to Germany once a week to purchase groceries there because they are half as expensive.

—————

After Zürich, I took a train to Interlaken, and then a bus to Iseltwald, a petite town on the shores of Lake Brienz, a 14-kilometer elongated body of water stretching like blue opal through a valley in the Alps. Brienz has a brother, Lake Thun, that is about 5 kilometers away and connected by a river, Aare, which runs through Interlaken, the biggest town in the valley and a hub for adventurers, athletes, daredevils, photographers, people with an Eye For The Aesthetic, outdoor music lovers, Lovely Old Couples Who Hike Together Holding Hands, and that one miserable dad who was having waaaaay less fun than his wife and daughter on Schilthorn yesterday (rip). And so on.

I could write for a while about the startling geography of this place. About how Thun is different from Brienz—the former being known for the larger villages on its edges, themselves famed for 12th-century architecture; and the latter being more remote, bluer, colder. I could write about going to Lauterbrunnen, a postcard-inspiring town set in a narrow valley in the Alps, and, as it so happens, the Favorite Place on Earth of a good friend of mine—where light poured in through the notch of the valley and against the face of the cliffs like a discreet thing you could see, and tracing a long thin line down one of those cliffs was a waterfall that kept a low distant rumble that hung over the town like fog. But I want to get back to that night at Lake Brienz.

Waterfall in Lauterbrunnen with people (bottom of image, just above tree)

I’m sitting at the end of the dock, my feet dangling over the water. I’ve been sitting for a while, eating a loaf of bread. I have some peanut butter and jam that I spread on the bread. This is my dinner. It is delicious.

I had run a lot that day, hiked a little too. I’d done some writing and reading and was fortunate enough to have watched it get dark over the lake. A few days before, I’d down something similar by Lake Zürich, sitting on a stone wall, eating dinner, watching clouds cover and uncover the moon. But here there was no moon. It was hidden somewhere behind the mountains. It had gotten dusk long before it had gotten dark, and now, finally, the stars were beginning to come out. Across the lake, the lights of a distant village reflected long and lifelike on the water, stretching in shimmering columns far more impressive than their sources. I traced the shore of the lake. It was difficult to discern. Water and sky were converging to the same deep blue. The mountains were barely visible. Depth conveyed only through fading — each successive peak whiter still.

There was a partial eclipse that night, but I didn't see it. I couldn’t find the moon. At some point, I stopped looking, and settled back into myself, and put in headphones. I listened to my favorite album, start to finish. At one point, the music swelled, and I responded by upping the volume, and my brain responded with a crescendo of chills. Blissful. Only afterward — after I took my headphones out and lay on my back looking at the stars and sat upright, glancing over my shoulder to see if anyone was there, if I had heard something, only to find no, I was alone — only then did I realize just how alone I was.

I was overcome then looking at the vast and placid lake sheltered in the sweeping bosom of the valley with the feeling I was very small. Awe—wonder—fear. I had heard this experience described recently as the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” The mysterious and awesome gaze. A theological term describing an encounter with the divine, when the unknown workings of something larger than yourself appear briefly before your eyes.

I knew the feeling. I think we all do.

I had encountered the mysterium tremendum et fascinans before. Like when I was twelve, and my father pulled over in rural Arizona, and we got out of the car to pee, and I looked up, and there was the sky like I’d never seen it before. I encountered it upon emerging from the subway for the first time in New York City. I encountered it the night after graduation, following some reluctant goodbyes, while walking back for the last time to an apartment now in boxes, and musing at how everything and nothing fit into those brown cardboard boxes, and how insufferably hot it had been that day for commencement, and how gloriously silly my loved ones had been. After some time on that walk as the silence stretched into silence, and I had only my thoughts, I began to wonder what would be next.

Then, as now, my imagination was arrested by an immediate and stupefying appreciation for something I cannot pinpoint. If it’s God, I don’t know. Like a lot of people my age, I’d say I’m “spiritual,” if anything. Raised Christian and having attended a Quaker school for thirteen years, I know what it meant to talk about God and religion. And even though I think Quaker meeting is valuable and enjoy the community that often forms around a church, in college, I rarely went to service. I did take to spending time in Rollins Chapel during my upperclassmen years at Dartmouth. But I would only go by myself, or else sit in the back in the dark and listen to the gospel choir rehearse late at night, often in the winter. Sometimes I prayed, but I didn’t know to what. I felt the closest kinship to something intangibly majestic on early-evening runs in the woods.

But then again, there were plenty of times when I would go for a run with a head cold or hungover or have to stop and shit. The spiritual element was a wildcard — I couldn’t predict it, not well anyway. And yet, I ran, and when it came, it was worth it.

So too with the lake, as with the other moments I’ve described — they were unforeseen. I don’t know what cognitive process is at work that allows for brief blips in consciousness to produce such a dissociative reimagining of the universe and our place in it. But it’s lovely. It's lovely that I can say with confidence you’ve experienced the same thing. Maybe not at a Swiss Lake. Probably not running in New Hampshire. But maybe sitting on the floor of your new house, eating Chinese food out of to-go boxes. Maybe in the hospital ward, after a night of agony, holding your new-born son for the first time. It’s a basic human experience, one often encountered in private, going undiscussed.

But if it isn’t too much to ask, please feel free to share a moment when you experienced the mysterium tremendum et fascinans In the comments or through email. I’d love to read them.

That we all share in the mystery — all peer at it unexpectedly from time-to-time — gives me hope. Not always. Not when I’m stuck in traffic. Not when I’m sick or in pain. But sometimes, when I let my mind wander, I’ll think self-contentedly about how how funny it is to think at all, or, to quote Neutral Milk Hotel, “how strange it is to be anything at all,” and in those moments I will be alone without being lonely and I’ll be happy without a reason.