Life & Wisdom Quote by Peter Bichsel

Bichsel builds a whole cosmology out of two anodyne nouns: “departure” and “paging.” Not the grand exit, not the dramatic announcement, but the station’s low-grade choreography of leaving and being called. The line feels like it’s overheard from a bench near a timetable, which is precisely the point: modern life reveals itself in systems, not epiphanies. “I was convinced” signals a private, almost stubborn faith in that mundanity. He’s not describing the world; he’s defending a theory of where meaning hides.

“Departure” suggests motion without heroism. It’s the everyday vanishing of people you won’t follow, trains you won’t board, chances you might miss. “Paging” is even thinner: a disembodied voice, a name broken into syllables, intimacy mediated by bureaucracy. Put together, they sketch a world that isn’t anchored in destinations but in thresholds and summonses, the constant sense that something is about to happen and you might be just off-screen when it does.

The subtext is quietly existential: the “world” is not an object out there but a sensation produced by transit infrastructure, by waiting rooms and public address speakers that keep you slightly unsettled. This fits Bichsel’s signature modesty - Swiss, postwar, anti-grandiose - where the small sentence carries the philosophical load. The intent isn’t to romanticize travel; it’s to name a modern condition: being convinced that life resides in interruption, in the moment you’re called away before you’ve even arrived.