I have always been jealous of the poets and writers of yore. The name on a book tends to be singular, but the reality was that almost every great name lived at one time or other as part of a circle, whose every member buoyed each other up, so that the work that came out the other end always bore the marks of collaboration. I think of Goethe’s friends at Jena and Weimar in particular, or the various literary-revolutionary circles in Russia. The best things anyone has ever achieved have always been the work of groups, and literature is no exception. The salons, the visiting evenings of the nineteenth century’s aristocracy always left me feeling more than a little jealous, for our world has changed, and such things are little possible today. But not, it must be said, impossible altogether.
In my case, I was inspired by a friend of mine. One year, he invited me and several other friends round to his house in Jurmala, on the Baltic coast, to meet his girlfriend. I had met her before, but not his friends. One was a refugee from Russia, a revolutionary featured in the papers who was now living in the US, another was a Czech interested in China and AI while still able to speak Latin, and the third was a genius in the truest and most chaotic sense of the word. Every day it was politics, history, art, and conversation heaped upon conversation. Good food, walks around Riga and along the Baltic coast – nothing could top the impression it left upon me. The girl herself spent the time hiding upstairs. In all honesty, I cannot blame her. I remember walking out of my room one midmorning to hear some of the guys downstairs talking about British fascism in a way that wasn’t quite condemnatory enough for my tastes, then wheeling around and going back to bed.
But the time I had there left a strong impression on me, and eventually, I decided to organise something similar with my own friends. We are extremely lucky to have a Swiss chalet in our family’s possession, and I took the approach that not sharing it with others would be a terrible waste. Switzerland, that legendary neutral country, is also at the centre of Europe and easily accessible from any of its corners – or indeed, from further afield. It was a logical choice for a friend group that has since university been scattered like marbles from an upturned bag.
As I get older, I have come to certain realisations that may seem quite ridiculous to those who have already reached them, but which would seem equally ridiculous to those who have yet to have made them their own. The good life, at least the kind of good life that I am after, is so simple that I sometimes feel I must have missed something. Good food, fresh air and nature, meaningful and impactful work, the company of people I love, the self-realisation that comes through creative endeavour, the expansion of the soul that comes through learning and sharing one’s thoughts with others – these are simple things. Yet to notice them and then to live according to them, to make them real and present – that’s the task of our entire lives.
The inaugural salon had as its goal the bringing together of a number of my friends in an environment that would allow people to rest, to think and to walk, with as little stress and as much freedom as possible. I imagined everyone lounging on sofas discussing Kant or some other interesting topic, perhaps with a glass of wine dangling precipitously over the carpet, exhausted physically after a day spent hiking in the mountains.
I miscalculated. I miscalculated both in ways that were positive and in ways that were negative. My first mistake was a certain overconfidence. You would have thought that an invitation to spend up to a week staying in a Swiss chalet for free with no obligations other than occasionally croaking something interesting for the host’s entertainment would be extremely popular. It was not so. There were many mumbled apologies and sorry-I’m-busys, which in the latter case at least was almost certainly partly my fault for being a little disorganised about sending invites. In the end, instead of two weeks and eight to twelve guests, the salon was only one week and only four guests, plus myself and my girlfriend. For a trial run, which this was, I think it was for the best.
First, those positives. I found myself enjoying things that I wouldn’t have expected. Being a host was actually a lot of fun – setting the table, cooking meals, doing the washing up, and maintaining a certain amount of order and cleanliness. It wasn’t just my desire to control things that made me have fun; it was also a certain amount of pride in offering a service to others and trying to make it the best I could. Whether it was getting up early to make the house nice or standing by the sink half-hearing conversations after dinner, there was real romance in what I was doing that I had hardly expected.
I also discovered that my ideal of people just lounging about philosophising isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I ended up with four people in all – and to simplify in a way that is a little uncharitable to the people themselves who are far more complicated than this makes it sound, there were two people who were quiet and philosophical, and two who were much louder and “normal”. I discovered that the person with whom I probably had the best chats, the one most obviously deep down a certain spectrum I myself belong on, was also the one who was outright unable to help with the cooking or cleaning, and whose behaviour was generally fairly odd. (There is a restaurant I will be embarrassed to return to on his account). But on the bright side, one evening while the others danced drunkenly inside, I stood with him on the balcony discussing Aquinas and the challenges of interpreting early Biblical texts that remain even when one knows the original languages, for he is studying Ancient Hebrew in Israel.
Those loud people, who did not necessarily always want to discuss the loftiest topics – though, of course, we managed that perfectly well as well – turned out to provide things I hadn’t counted on needing when I started planning. They were great around the house, cooking, cleaning, and making such a hubbub that everything was bathed in a warm orange glow. What I had forgotten was that intellectual conversations without much life surrounding them, no matter the passion behind them, feel somewhat sad and empty after a while. In short, I realised that I should put far more weight behind factors that I had not previously considered important.
Things I had not counted on were mostly related to the actual running of things. There was a certain amount of stress concerning money and making sure nobody spilled anything on the carpet. More difficult, however, was the tiredness that sunk its teeth ever deeper into me as the week-or-so went on. Now, true to the salon’s aims, I could just disappear upstairs for a nap – the guests, left to themselves, were happy to go for walks or read Jane Austen or do whatever work they had – but even so, I found myself getting grumpier and ever more tired as the time went on, which obviously turned me from that prim and proper host I had been at the beginning into a terrible creature much befitting the mountains around us and their mood of Romantic desolation. I am extremely grateful to my girlfriend for not only taking on the lion’s share of the housekeeping, but also doing it fantastically. Without her I think we might have starved conversationally and definitely would have starved culinarily.
Now that everyone has gone, I am able to reflect. Already the tiredness is dripping away, and what remains are the good things – the photos, the memories, the numbness in my legs from all those walks, and last but not least my newly-acquired knowledge of the early Church Fathers. The fundamental idea behind the salon, of bringing my friends together, worked like a charm. There were good conversations, both with and without me. People who knew each other, got to know each other better, and those who did not know each other, managed to make at least a new acquaintance, and possibly in a case or two, a new friend.
What we are doing in this life, I still don’t know. We make decisions whose consequences we cannot apprehend, and even those decisions are made with the desperation of someone being carried down a hurtling river, reaching for something to hold on to. But I can say that, except for my wallet, which is not that important anyway, the salon achieved what I wanted it to do. It made a break in the torrent, a space for rest and for caring about people rather than one’s goals and ambitions, and for that I am grateful. I hope that next year we may manage two weeks instead of just the one and get new people to experience the wonder of the Swiss Alps and the peace of the mountain peaks.