Do you hang out with the writers of your favourite novels?
Do you travel with them, cook, and stay all night talking? You type, transcribe, memorize parts by heart, and then retell them with them one more time, and who knows how many times.
I have been traveling with Olja for years, always by ferry Split Brac, Split Vis.
In return, it is somehow incredibly emotional. The ferry departs from Vis at 5 in the morning, and the sun has just risen behind the hill. Too fast.
I could not capture everything I felt towards those images slowly disappearing on the horizon. Then we are left alone. It was just the sea, myself and Olja. She tells me stories in silence about her childhood, love, Split, and the sea. I woke up with my head in her lap.
“For one year only, maybe two, we were happy, and that derivative of epiphany proved to be permanent, blurred in the rest of the time. This is reliable proof that it was a violation from higher spheres of life about divine and divine pornography. It can explain why love has been banned since its inception. It is still banned. Can you say it is not when all our life stories grow out of this notorious fact?”.
Olja Savičević Ivančević, from the book Singer in the Night.
