Mission #2: Castle of Chillon

There are seven pillars of Gothic mould, / In Chillon's dungeons deep and old, / There are seven columns, massy and grey, / Dim with a dull imprison'd ray, / A sunbeam which hath lost its way

 The Prisoner of Chillon, Lord Byron 1816

Found Byron's sunbeam.

While Mary was writing Frankenstein, Shelley & Byron took off on a boat tour of Lake Geneva, on their own writer's quest to follow Rousseau's footsteps, which took them to the other end of the crescent-shaped Lac Leman, to the far town of Montreux, where the two poets visited the Chateau de Chillon, where I spent Thursday afternoon; a splendid day in the sun with rocks and lake and tulips tumbling over the lake and the Alps all around and the castle always in sight. On the journey, a storm caught them in the middle of the lake, nearly wrecking the two of them in their little boat, and Shelley wrote horribly prescient things in his journal about his brush with death on the water - but that wouldn't happen till six years later - this trip, he came out of it okay and so they went a'touring the old castle, which is famous now for the pillar where Byron engraved his name, but the truth might be that a castle guard carved the poet's name shortly after his visit, to capitalize on the Byron's fame in order to encourage Swiss tourism. What none of the guidebooks says on this point is how pockmarked every pillar is with graffiti from a thousand visitors before and after Byron, hieroglyphs carved so thick, the stones could very well be tree bark. So Byron was hardly the first to deface the castle - if it was even him. Everyone wants his name in stone. I sat in the seven-pillared room for a good long while (did not deface it) and thought about the days when two poets could pull right up to the castle in their boat and kick around having lord knows what conversations while looking at stones, stones, and more stones, with no souvenir shops and hardly any English around, avoiding the ladies in their lives, thinking about freedom and history how to change the world via poetry. The funny thing about these places and these visits is that you go half-wishing a ghost would step out of the wall, and even though you know this cannot happen, the thought of it, the proximity of the past, of memory, even just the 200-year-old silhouette of a building, takes hold of your whole life for the few moments you're there, and those other eras become more true, all of a sudden, because of the way the light falls in that other place.

 I am stationed down the lakeshore from the castle at a hotel about seventy-five years out of date, with a church next door, a casino across the street, and a 1911 elevator with plush red carpet. Montreux could not be more enchanting. This morning, Dimanche, the lord's day, I woke to the sound of a coughing European in the next room mixed with the floating harmonies of the choir coming out of the church. Mary wrote in her journal about the songs of the vintagers that surrounded Maison Chapuis, how the women had masculine voices that were rough but still pleasant. (MWS was daintier than you picture her, and often catty and overcritical, even when complimenting; sharp-tongued and that's why I like her.) Still, I know what she means, about local music, that raw sound, homegrown. It was lovely, and not terrifically characteristic of Montreux, which is otherwise not at all raw. I'd try to tell you what Montreux is like except that I think it may not be like any other place there is. I suppose in American comparisons, you could cross Miami, Aspen, and, say, Savannah, and you'd have something like Montreux. Freddie Mercury lived here, and now his statue rocks forever on the edge of the lake. The microclimate keeps it warm, so we have palmetto trees and Arizona cypresses and a flower-lined promenade on the lake, while the white-capped alps roar up around us at all angles, keeping the cold out. The light collects blue on the lake all afternoon, then burns out at sunset with a glow I'm going to remember when I'm ninety. Tonight there was exactly one half moon in the sky. The first theme of this trip is literary, that's true, but the second theme, is to look at nothing but beautiful things for two solid weeks. Everywhere I turn is another eye-full of glassy lake, serene hillside, dramatic mountain, crumbling villa, marvelous tulip, cascading willow, you name it, any combination thereof. A visual detox to extend my life span by two years, at least.