Page - 192 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

192 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Nataša Rogelja | The sea: place of ultimate freedom? fresh air and listening to the sound of waves. Was this the same sound as on my meditation tape? Did the sea around me resemble the images in the book or might the images just help me pass the chilly night? Places are not merely physical surface and substance, but are deeply inter- connected with the images imposed on them. While it is the contemporary technological and other developments that facilitate this lifestyle, the historical perspective has to be invited into discussion as well. Initial models of the sea in the Western world were connected with fear and horror (corbin 1994); the sea as a locus of horror, one that witnesses The flood, is according to corbin associated with two main sources, the Bible and a considerable body of classical texts.7 In corbin’s view, this context was prevalent before the 18th century, when, during the ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, a different perception of the sea with more idyllic images was brought forth.8 The sea of the English Romantics such as John Keats (1795–1821), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) and Samuel Taylor cole- ridge (1772–1834), to name just a few, was portrayed with admiration. If the Romantics were democrats and freedom fighters (Raban 1993: 18), Joseph conrad (1857–1924), a precursor of modernist literature who wrote many stories and novels with nauti- cal settings, sailed in the other direction. his right-wing political beliefs directed him to set sails – in reality and through literature – because “…the land was polluted beyond repair – by social- ism and ‘radical reform’ […]” (ibid). for conrad, the sea was a strong national symbol and the last untainted, venerable and holy place left on the Earth’s surface,9 where one can still main- tain order (Raban 1993: 18–19). conrad and his romantic predecessors not only wrote about the sea, but were also passionate amateur sailors, travellers or had worked in the merchant navy.10 They wrote about the sea and they got soaked by the sea as well. In the context of this intimate relationship between sea and man, the small-boat sailors and their writings had a special place in the sea-symbolism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Despite the fact that small-boat sailing was well established in England at the end of the 19th century, it was an American who first circumnavigated the world in a small sailing boat. In 1895, Joshua Slocum – a seaman, adventurer and writer – was the first man to sail single- handedly around the world. A book he published in 1900, Sailing Alone Around the World, can even today be found on many liveaboards‘ boats. Slocum, a trained and experienced sailor, wrote about the sea and his experience in a much less spectacular manner as his ancestors did while he contributed (in his specific descriptive way) to the understanding of human experience on the sea. “About midnight the fog shut down again denser than ever before. One could almost “stand on it.” It continued so for a number of days, the wind increasing to a gale. The waves rose high, but I had a good ship. Still, in the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on a straw in the midst of the elements. I lashed the helm, and my vessel held her course, and while she sailed I slept. […] The loneliness of my state wore off when the gale was high and I found much work to do. When fine weather returned, then came the sense of solitude, which I could not shake off. I used my voice often, at first giving some order about the affairs of a ship, for I had been told that from disuse I should lose my speech. At the meridian altitude of the sun I called aloud, “Eight bells,” after the custom on a ship at sea. Again from my cabin I cried