28 October 2012

But the leaves are still green

“In the depths of Winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible Summer.” – Albert Camus, in Retour à Tipasa (essay included in L'Eté, originally in French: "Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.")

We're just one month into Autumn. The altitude is 400 metres, here in Switzerland just next to the Zürich lake. And it's snowing since yesterday. The leaves haven't finished falling yet, some of them are still green even. A lady apparently sympathises with the freezing ducks and swans, feeding them with a bag full of bread scraps.

It's my fifth year living here. The weather continues to surprise me every time: 26 degrees Celsius of water temperature in the lake during some Summers that allowed me to go straight swimming, snow as late as mid April at this low altitude, hail so strong that it smashed windows and dented cars like bullet impacts, Siberian winds so cold that temperatures fell below minus twenty degrees Celsius in the city.

I'm back home now from my brief stroll, melancholically listening to Yann Tiersen's Amélie album, including tunes such as the following two: