I am about to leave on a trip to Switzerland, the land of perfectly synchronized watches, timepieces and clocks.  Both the challenges and the joys of any trip one attempts occur long before departure.  My personal  strategy for vacation trips is to pick a desirable destination spot that I have not seen before and begin planning.  The initial concept is always pleasant.  Vague fantasies of rapturous moments gazing at historic buildings or landscapes once seen in a blockbuster movie.

However, the grim part of any vacation is in the nasty, endless details like booking plane tickets, informing my patients that I will be leaving, paying for the flight and booking reservations in a hotel. This planning part shares more with the character of work instead of play but without a paycheck for your efforts. In fact, one is paying for all this fun.

The next part of the vacation is planning the itinerary. This I also find exceedingly difficult if not downright painful. I tend to get overwhelmed with so many ideas given to you in all the travel books you buy to orient you.

In the case of Switzerland, there are many cites, like Zurich, Bern, Luzern, Lausanne, etc.  Even when you narrow that down, you have to figure out which mountain you want to climb, which restaurant you want to visit, and which museum you must see.  All this is daunting, anxiety producing and exhausting.

Of course, the alternative is to not have any itinerary and just wing it. But that usually means you give into jet lag and hang out in the hotel for the whole trip. Not a good idea since the trip is costing you large dollars and one does want to get  one’s money’s worth.

So as you can readily see, the planning and the paying for the trip is a painful,  tedious and anxiety producing affair.  And that’s why only 10 % of American’s have passports. They all see that it’s easier to just take a trip to Disney World and say hi to Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

So far no fun but I have found  a very solid solution to this  Vacation Optimization Problem.   I look up what is the most important novel written about the  country I’m visiting, go to the library and check it out. This is the only part of the trip that costs nothing.

Before I went to Paris I read “Les Misérables”  by Victor Hugo. Before I went to Hawaii I read “Hawaii” by James Michener.  Before I went to Spain I read “Don Quixote” by Cervantes.   This not only added to the trip’s fun, but it allowed me to enjoy the trip long before I got there. In many ways reading the book is better than the trip itself.

So this time, in preparation for my trip to Switzerland, I’m reading “The Magic Mountain “ by Thomas Mann, a 706-page masterpiece about a guy named Hans Castorp. who goes up to a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Swiss Alps for a three-week visit to his cousin and winds up staying for a few years. Perhaps the Swiss Alps are as addictive as Capri is.   Somerset Maugham wrote that wonderful book “The Lotus Eater” about the guy who visited Capri on vacation and decided to stay  for the rest of his life.

“The Magic Mountain”  book is an intense study of time, magic, indolence and illness. Thomas Mann talks about how taking your temperature four times a day is quite a useful exercise in meditation. The sanitarium suggests that the proper way to take your temperature is to keep the thermometer in the mouth for a full seven minutes. which  forces you to stop what you’re doing, slow down and do nothing at all.   This is like Transcendental Meditation but without the guru.

In the sanitarium,  time is not measured by days or weeks but months and years. There is a wondrous leisurely pace to the place and contrary to expectation, even the patients who are nearest to  death are jovial and joyful. This reminded me of what my analyst once said when I was in training at Nassau County Medical Center. He remarked that on most hospital wings, the patients were not depressed at all and seemed to enjoy the rest, relaxation and pampering  provided by the doctors and nurses.

Perhaps there is something magical in the air in the Swiss Alps.  There is another creative genius who was born and raised in a tiny shack in the Swiss Alps. Werner Herzog, the director of masterful  films like “Aguirre: Wrath of God” and  “Fitzcarraldo,” grew up in the Swiss mountains without electricity but went on to create some of the greatest films.

I am sure that I will enjoy the sights and  sounds and food of Switzerland, but I doubt that I will enjoy any of it as much as I am enjoying “The Magic Mountain,” a wonderful book about life, death and the magic found atop mountains.

I now have many merry thoughts in my mind as I prepare for this journey to the top of the world.  I have these thoughts only because I chose to read a masterpiece, which will be my travel guide throughout my journey. Vacations are a time to leave the prosaic and the mundane behind for a week and enter the world of magic. And what better way to find magic than to first read about it on the page.