EUROPA – HOLIDAYS

There is a complete encyclopaedia of experiences referring to holidays, or to use a more appropriate expression, referring to the art of holidaying that recommends ways and forms of man’s resting, from those of tourist guides to therapeutic instructions and doctors’ advice. Planning one’s holidays has thus become a serious and demanding task. It is either left to the person’s will or to the powerful suggestions of some tourist agency that pays more care to your acquisition of knowledge and learning about some unknown land that thinking about the relaxation of your body in the shade of some pine tree. The subject under discussion is, of course, active and passive holidays. Recreation, jogging, playing polo or golf, rowing, swimming, sailing ... could be fatiguing but should be understood, due to the agonist principle, as active holidays, as it marks the dynamic change of man’s habitual and tiring everyday routine. There are, then, holidays and “holidays”. To find a small place, peace and sunshine, one has to travel long kilometres. Long lines of cars that in the summer months look like migrations or invasion forces, the heat, the drivers’ nervousness ... this is the scenery and décor of present-day holidays. The image of holidays should definitely not contain speeding along the highways or rushing through supermarkets, nor should we be trailed by a swarm of doubts dragging behind us, particularly when we, after sometimes tragicomic preparations, finally start upon our journey. Have we forgotten something? Have we locked everything up? Have we left our windows half-open or have we drawn the blinds (which is not good as an undesirable intruder may conclude there is no one at home)? Have we committed our letter box to the care of a reliable person to empty it daily for the above mentioned reason of caution? A great number of our holiday days also carry traumatic and frustrating signs that we cannot get rid even in some earthly paradise. What we want to say is that holidaying will depend on ourselves and less on the place we have arrived at. As a matter of fact, we know people who return from their holidays more tired than they were before. As if they had been serving a prison sentence on a deserted island or in Alcatraz! If our everyday life represents a web of circumstances due to someone else’s and in a lesser part our own will, as is often the case, the holiday had best been planned by us. Resting under the shade of a pine or fig tree, we should, like on this postage stamp, little by little return to the original tourist pictures that, according to the moralistic catechism invoke the Satan, and following the hedonistic principle it is the god of love, Cupid: to the old picture postcards with young girls in modest bathing costumes, with coloured and retouched sunsets and with calligraphic texts like “Greetings from the Adriatic”, or “Greetings from Rab”, etc. All these objects, drenched in light, are an old-fashioned metaphor but are, even today, desirable archetypes of holidays that presuppose the man in his deckchair outside of the tragic images of the Venetian beach in T.Mann’s literary work. This is no florid speech about the sea and the sun, the summer breeze that caresses the warm skin on the body. There is no cheapness, because both the Adriatic and the Mediterranean – this “womb of humankind and cradle of civilisations” (Magris) are sufficient for the sagacity of veritable relaxing and the riddance of our weariness. This is the place where we should tell to ourselves our simple and sincere story about our life that ends with a question mark (how should we go on), and in only rare cases with an exclamation mark. Regarding our sea, the Croatian Adriatic, that is still a landscape where all our constant overstraining could be soothed or may disappear. And though it might be difficult, and it is getting more and more difficult, to find a peaceful little place in some bay that has not yet been spoilt by some big constructions or where the sea water has not yet been muddied by the big fish hatcheries, the Croatian coast is still a pastoral area and a tiny part of the lost European paradise.