Impressions

In a serious conversation yesterday, someone I'd just met asked me for my impression of Vienna, and I blanked. Having an impression should be easy, but it is really the hardest thing, especially when one is fighting the demon of being nice and the demon of having something acceptable to say that will also be understood. So, like with all good questions I haven't answered in my decades of talking, this question kept burping up all day, "What is my impression of Vienna?" I finally found one of maybe a thousand answers in the difficulty I was having with the question: Vienna is a city in dialogue with its cliches. It has so many cliches: the coffeehouse cliche, the city of Mozart cliche, the Catholic cliche, the Hapsburg cliche, the "first victim of the Nazis" cliche, the "Hitler's most enthusiastic helpers" cliche, the city of ultimate open-ness cliche, the melting pot cliche, the rich and politically irrelevant cliche, and maybe also the Disney theme park cliche. All of these have something to them and also some very big things against them, but one thinks of the city by remembering them and also trying to forget them -- just that movement. And one is always tempted to fall away from one and into another, to just go back and forth among them. 

In that way, traveling here is an intense lesson in a certain kind of personal epistemology, one that Wittgenstein, for one, took to heart.  Knowing is sometimes well described as forging what one wants to say, crafting it out of experience. Maybe Thoreau, a couple of chapters into Walden, does something like that, after he gets the rhetoric out of his system and really looks at his pond. But more often, when one is not in a woods but in an old city of many layers, as we mostly are, knowing is noticing what we are tempted to say and how it doesn't quite work, and also how the opposite of what we are tempted to say also doesn't quite work. That's a reasonable summary, I think, of Philosophical Investigations, for which Vienna was the training ground.