Throwing Snowballs at the World
When I was living in Kenya, I read Ivo Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle, and one of its characters stayed with me.
Amédée des Fossés is a young Frenchman attached to the consulate in Bosnia, surrounded by people whose habits, assumptions and social rules are not his own. He could easily have responded in the traditional expatriate manner: by remaining French in the most tedious possible sense, constantly measuring everything around him against the way things were done at home.
Instead, he becomes curious.
He listens to how people speak. He picks up expressions. He notices their jokes, their habits, their little verbal rituals. And occasionally he throws their own sayings back at them.
People like him for it.
Not because he has become Bosnian. He has not. He has simply understood something useful about entering another world: you can spend your time standing outside it, or you can begin to play with what you find there.
I recognized him immediately because, without having thought much about it, I had already begun doing something similar in Kenya.
Life became easier once I stopped insisting that people behave according to rules I had brought with me. If someone said something strange, I learned how to answer. If there was a local expression, I remembered it. If people teased me, I teased them back.
There were little linguistic doors everywhere. Most of them were insignificant. A phrase, a joke, an unexpected reply. But each offered the same choice: you could remain outside, or you could walk through.
What interested me about des Fossés was not simply that he adapted well to another culture. It was the attitude underneath it. Years later I would recognize something similar in Montaigne.
Life becomes considerably easier when you stop demanding that it present itself in the correct form.
Montaigne is constantly discovering that reality has failed to consult him. The body misbehaves. People contradict themselves. Plans collapse. We are vain, frightened, ridiculous, inconsistent creatures. The world refuses to arrange itself according to our theories.
Montaigne’s answer is rarely outrage.
It is more often curiosity.
Fine.
So this is what human beings are like.
What now?
I carried some version of that attitude with me when I later lived in Thailand. The material changed completely. Different language, different manners, different forms of politeness, different things that could be said and different things that were better left unsaid. But the basic choice remained the same.
I could remain outside and judge everything according to my own categories.
Or I could play.
Playing does not mean surrendering judgment. It does not require pretending that every custom is admirable or that every society is equally pleasant. It means something simpler: accepting that this is the world presently in front of you and becoming interested in what can be done inside it.
Then, eventually, I returned to Switzerland.
Switzerland is an excellent country. It works.
Trains arrive. People generally do what they said they would do. Things are clean. The water is drinkable. The administration may occasionally attempt to kill you with a form, but the form will at least be correctly printed.
There is a great deal to recommend the place.
Socially, however, Switzerland can also be grey.
Not bad.
Grey.
People are careful. Strangers rarely burst into conversation. They do not normally tell you their life stories while waiting for a bus. You can stand beside the same person every morning for three years and eventually achieve the considerable intimacy of a brief nod.
At first I thought this was simply something I had to accept.
Then I realized that I already knew what to do.
Exactly what I had done in Kenya.
Exactly what I had done in Thailand.
I could play with the material I had been given.
Recently I came out of Lake Constance and an older man asked me how far I had swum.
“Amsterdam,” I said. “Then I turned around.”
He smiled.
Nothing happened.
And something happened.
The afternoon became slightly different.
This is where Heidegger enters the story, perhaps unwillingly.
He has the famous idea that human beings are thrown into the world. We arrive without being consulted. Nobody asks which century we would prefer, which country, which parents, which body or which temperament.
One day you simply discover that you are here.
Kenya.
Thailand.
Switzerland.
Fine.
The problem with Heidegger is that he can make even this perfectly recognizable fact sound as though one ought to sit in a dark forest contemplating death.
Thrownness.
Being.
Existence.
Anxiety.
After twenty pages you begin to suspect that making a sandwich requires an encounter with the abyss.
I prefer a less solemn response.
If I have been thrown into the world, I can throw something back.
A snowball.
A joke.
A strange answer.
A gesture.
A pebble into the lake, simply to see what happens to the surface.
This does not mean imagining that reality is whatever I want it to be. The lake remains cold. Switzerland remains reserved, orderly and often very grey.
Fine.
But I have snowballs.