Life & Wisdom Quote by Peter Bichsel

A country’s troubles aren’t elusive, Peter Bichsel suggests; the real trick is what comes after the recognition. The line lands with the deceptively plain diction Bichsel built a career on: “very fast” is almost childlike, a phrase you can hear in everyday speech, which is exactly the point. He’s flattening the grandiosity that typically surrounds “national problems” and treating them as something you can spot at a glance, like a crack in a wall. That simplicity is a scalpel, not a shrug.

The subtext reads as a quiet indictment of political theater. If problems are “fast to recognize,” then the bottleneck isn’t diagnosis but will: the slow, grinding reluctance to act, the incentives to keep problems legible but unsolved, the comfort of endlessly naming symptoms. Bichsel’s irony is gentle but pointed: societies are full of people who mistake noticing for doing, and who confuse the clarity of complaint with the difficulty of repair.

Context matters: Bichsel, a Swiss writer associated with spare, exact storytelling and civic attentiveness, was shaped by postwar European stability that often masked deeper anxieties about conformity, exclusion, and complacency. In that setting, “recognize” becomes a barbed verb. Recognition is easy because the signs are obvious; what’s hard is admitting complicity, paying costs, disrupting routines. The sentence works because it refuses the romantic myth of complexity. It implies our problems persist not because they’re mysterious, but because they’re familiar.