The steamer moves quietly out of the historic Rütli Meadow on Lake Lucerne into waters of an unbelievable turquoise, a colour that can only be imagined. As the wind comes off the Rigi in long clean sweeps and the villages on either shore recede into their Alpine stillness, the noise of the ordinary world falls away. And I begin to palpably feel the presence of silence and the spirit of the great writers who had come to these waters before me.

It’s been many days since I came to its shores. It was not for anything else but a pilgrimage, an act of homage to the writers and musicians who shaped the way I see and hear and think. I came to T.S. Eliot young, as so many of my generation did, and spent years inside The Waste Land, that great broken monument to a civilisation in crisis, assembled from fragments of everything Eliot had loved and mourned: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” What I did not fully understand until I stood on the deck of the steamer, with the Alps closing in on all sides, was how much of The Waste Land is Wagnerian, and how deeply Eliot had absorbed the music that was born on these very shores.

The Rhine daughters from Götterdämmerung move through the poem like waterborne ghosts. Wagner, composing those obsessions into music at Tribschen, just a few kilometres along this same shore where I spent some blissful days, had no idea that a young American poet would one day turn them into the defining poem of the modern age. Frisch weht der wind — the fresh wind blows — sounds across Eliot’s opening pages, a fragment of Tristanund Isolde carrying with it all the weight of doomed love and irrecoverable loss. Eliot took Wagner’s obsessions of desire, dissolution, and the yearning for transcendence, and projected them through the traumatised landscape of the 20th century.

Travel by imagination

Just off the shore near Brunnen, the steamer passes a small rocky island called the Schillerstein — Schiller’s Rock — named after Friedrich Schiller, the German poet and dramatist who wrote Wilhelm Tell, that blazing celebration of Swiss freedom and resistance to tyranny. The Swiss adopted his vision as their own national myth, though Schiller never came here. He never crossed this lake, never felt this wind blowing through his hair as I did. He conjured the Rütli meadow, the mountains, the lake itself, entirely from imagination, so ardently that it possessed his very being, and a rock was named for him on waters he never crossed. Imagination, it turns out, is the more reliable form of travel.

They came, these writers and composers and visionaries, not as tourists but as runaways from political tyranny and personal adversity. The overpowering conventions of the societies that had formed them had to be shed. Wagner arrived at Tribschen in exile, banned from his homeland, his great cycle of music dramas still unfinished. Tolstoy came as a young man barely formed, still searching for the moral framework that would consume his later life. Hesse came broken by the First World War, by a collapsing marriage and a nervous crisis that had brought him to the edge of a breakdown. Mary Shelley came at 18, though to Lake Geneva, in the aftermath of personal tragedy. What was common among them was a landscape so overwhelming in its beauty that it demanded an equivalent seriousness in return.

Wagner at Tribschen composed with a fury and a tenderness that coexist nowhere else so starkly as in the Siegfried Idyll, placed as it is on a staircase at dawn for the woman he loved — the epitome of human grandiosity. Schiller, who never left his study, summoned from pure imagination a Switzerland so vivid and so morally alive that it outlasted every political upheaval that followed. Tolstoy, shaken to his core by the indifference of wealthy hotel guests to a street musician playing outside their windows, sat down and wrote of Lucerne with an anger so grief-stricken that A Ballad of Hotel Schweitzerhof became a lasting wound in his mind. And Hesse, walking the hills above the lake day after day, found in the Swiss light a bridge between the European tradition that had formed him and the Eastern philosophy toward which his broken spirit was reaching.

Solemnity and honesty

The lake asked the same thing of each of them: solemnity and honesty. Sitting on the upper deck of the ferry, as Rütli recedes, the cool wind off the Rigi touches something in me too. The villages pass in their stillness, and the ghosts arrive together with Eliot carrying Wagner, Wagner haunting Eliot, Schiller’s rock rising from the water though its namesake never touched it.

What was first imagined on these waters indeed becomes a palpable experience of what I have so much loved and believed in all my life. To my mind, this is what a pilgrimage feels like. Not the arrival at a shrine, but the crossing, the in-between suspension over turquoise water, in the company of the dead who remain so stubbornly alive.

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