You flip through a book and—boom—connection. Something awakens inside you; the inner waters stir, shift. A force beyond yourself, or perhaps your own unconscious strength, ignites with brutal, magical intensity. That longing, that strong and inexplicable attraction… is mine. The same one that pulls me, time and again, to the sea. No matter where I am, I always look toward the sea.
I refer to this text:
"I have never been out on the open sea; I have never worked on a ship; I have never lived through a fierce storm in the middle of the Atlantic; I have never looked up at the sky for the stars to tell me where I am, nor have I ever felt the sensation of an abyss opening beneath my feet. My knowledge of the open sea and its depths is more or less the same as my knowledge of outer space or the surface of the Moon. I conceive of them primarily as products of the imagination.
Yet the sea has always seduced me. I have dreamed of the sea, of what "erases all traces." I have been drawn to books and films about it, about the creatures that hide within it and the people who have tried to tame it. I have run my fingers over the faded anchor tattooed on my father's arm—he, who had never been out on the open sea either, but who, for some reason, bore a sailor’s symbol on his forearm.
It is not easy to explain why, but I believe it is because the sea represents both origin and continuity—because it is mysterious and seemingly boundless to the eye, yet at the same time, it is something that is always there, appearing immutable even as it constantly changes. It is a place you long to escape to when life becomes tedious and demanding. In any case, the pull has always been there, like an ancestral yearning, like the inherited tattoo of an anchor beneath the skin."
Den lodande människanby Patrik Svensson