TRACES IN THE OCEAN. On Melville, Wolanowski, and Willing Suspension of Disbelief
TRACES IN THE OCEAN. On Melville, Wolanowski, and Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Summary/Abstract: I am reading Wolanowski as a 45-year-old, in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century—and I swallow the 290 pages of his book on the "Rebels of the South Seas" in one night. Just like thirtyodd years before, when—as a chronically ill, bed-ridden child from the then smoggy, industrial, province of Silesia—I would devour every book that a kind parental hand would leave at my night table (then, out of sheer boredom), especially, if such a book could teleport me to places distant in time and space. So distant that they would seem unreal; so unreal that they would almost seem a fairy-tale, born of someone’s poetic imagination. Quite honestly, in the 1970s and 80s it would not make an iota of difference to me if I went to sea on board of the Adventure with Moominpappa, or whether I sailed around the world with Joshua Slocum as a deckhand of the Spray. At the time, the facticity of distant realities was just as unverifiable for me as it was for the adults of my family. Only I had not yet developed the necessary awareness to understand how important this difference was for them.

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