But I have not completely abandoned hope in this regard, for there are institutions besides those that provide food and drink that seek to improve our lives here.
Landschlacht has the Chapel of St. Leonhard , a Kindergarten and a Primary School. I have rarely explored Scherzingen — I have never seen the point — so I cannot with much authority tell you what Scherzingen has to offer, save for the church the Kreuzlingen bus passes. But the one asset that Scherzingen produced, in spite of itself, is the Swiss author Peter Stamm.
So when my wife implores me for the millionth time to declutter and put my life in order, she is absolutely correct. But she fails to realize that it is these things that keep me bound to where I am.
And it is this impulse, rarely spoken, often felt, of simply walking away from everyone and everything that Stamm powerfully captures in To the Back of Beyond. Because are there not moments within us all when we have wondered how we would go about disappearing from our own lives? At first Astrid asks herself where he has gone, and then when he is coming back, and finally whether he is even alive. I am a walker, and during these disease-riddled days with bookstores, cinemas, gyms, libraries, museums, restaurants and schools closed, my wise wife recommends for both my mind and body that I take a walk around the neighbourhood every day.
Though never pursued, there lies within me what I like to call the Stamm Seduction. Each time I continue straight on through Altnau on the now-named Zelglistrasse through more fields of rapeseed and grass and orchards of blossoming apple trees to reach the large greenhouse festooned with flowers for sale….. They come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources. And it is this impulse that is rarely communicated and never understood when a man tries to explain it to a woman.
