Death on the Beach: Essays from a Marginal World - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Per Högselius grew up in Stockholm, Sweden. As a child he dreamed about becoming an astronomer, which led him to study physics at university. In his teens he discovered palaeontology, history and literature. A hopeless romantic, he wished he had lived in the nineteenth century. He became a passionate traveller, targeting not so much the distant corners of the world but the nearby post-Cold War lands of the Baltic Sea region. His journeys there became the basis for his first non-academic book in Swedish, the historical travelogue Östersjövägar (Baltic Sea Paths, 2007). Later on, he fell in love with the North Sea and subsequently with China. Meanwhile Per has pursued an academic career in the history of science, technology and environment. A professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, he enjoys juxtaposing different genres and styles of writing in exploring human experiences with technology and nature. He writes regularly for the leading Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet

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Preface

As far back as I can remember, I've been drawn to beaches.

The beaches of my childhood belonged to Lake Mälaren, their sand dark and coarse. My mother anxiously watched over me as I played at the water's edge. Further out, there was a shipping lane where large boats passed by. I wasn't allowed to swim out that far.

When I was eleven, we took a family holiday on Gotland, the large island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. There, we stumbled across Kvarnåkershamn, a small village where several plots of land were for sale in the coastal pine forest. The cottage my parents quickly had built became my fixed point during the summers that followed. It's where I met my first love and lost myself in longing. But when I was alone, I roved the shingle beaches in search of fossils. The rocks were full of long-since extinct plants and animals: crinoids, corals, trilobites. I dreamed of becoming a palaeontologist, dedicating my days to these creatures that once were.

As it happened, however, my scientific career never really took off. Instead, I increasingly turned my gaze to the sea, towards the foreign beaches hidden somewhere beyond the horizon. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I went to see them. I took to writing about the Baltic Sea region and its eventful past. I was struck by how our new, optimistic era – in which we were said to have reached the end of history – contrasted with the physical state of the Baltic's eastern shores: they were desolately dirty, littered with debris from the Cold War Era. Rumour had it mines were still buried in the sand.

Many years later, I settled in the Netherlands for a while. I wandered the beaches of the North Sea, my daily routine governed by the rhythm of the tide. I still remember the silhouettes of the freight ships out at sea, lying at anchor as they waited to dock in Rotterdam. At the beach cafés, I listened to stories of capsized ships and beached whales. I thought about Doggerland, once a favourite grazing ground for woolly mammoths between the Netherlands and the UK, now swallowed by the sea.

Beaches are places of mystery and contradiction. And over time, I've come to see more of their dark side, not only in my own explorations, but also through my encounters with the seashore in literature, film, art, and music – as well as in the daily reports from every corner of the world relayed to me by the newspapers.

Where does it come from, this dark side? Is there a way to find out? I remember a faded old photograph my mother once showed me. She's standing on a Black Sea beach, a smiling young woman, with her arms around a tall, lanky man who is about to become my father. She doesn't know it yet: that she's pregnant. That a child is growing inside her. The sea glitters behind them, the sea that was named for blackness, even though it's so blindingly bright in the summer sun.