Look at them up there in the white nothing, those figures scattered across snow that doesn’t give a shit about their aspirations or their carefully calibrated sense of adventure. They’re having what they’ve decided to call a party, because that’s what you do when you’re off somewhere expensive, you give it a name, make it official, pretend the experience is somehow transformative.
Victor
Where did you spend the last one?
Amanda
(warmingly)
Victor.
Victor
I want to know.
Amanda
St. Moritz. It was very attractive.
Victor
I hate St. Mortiz.
Amanda
So do I.
Noël Coward, Private Lives
Coward knew the score. “So do I,” Amanda says about St. Moritz, and there it is, the whole beautiful, terrible truth about why we drag ourselves to places we claim to despise. We go because everyone else went, because we heard it was supposed to mean something, because sitting still in the familiar places feels like death by a thousand mild contentments.
The photograph doesn’t lie though. The postcard prettiness, leaves you with what’s actually there: human shapes against an indifferent landscape, trying to make meaning happen through sheer force of will. That’s the party, not the champagne or the designer snowsuits, but the raw fact of people choosing to be cold together, to lounge in a place that will forget them the moment they leave.
What makes you human isn’t what you love. It’s what you endure, what you choose even when you know it’s ridiculous, even when Amanda and Victor are both rolling their eyes at the whole goddamn enterprise. The party happens anyway. It always does.