Memory, death, love, prayer… all these are forms of travel in this exquisitely written contemplation.

As we read these accounts of voyages lived as intimate experiences – on a merchant cargo ship, in Argentina, or hunting whales – Christiane Rancé invites us to reflect on what might constitute our "authentic sojourn on Earth," as Mallarmé put it.
We thrill to childhood memories that resurface in these wanderings, we weep for the young Argentines who fell victim to the dictatorship, we become passionately involved in the search for the true sources of Melville’s Moby Dick… Yet at the very heart of this search for the "open sea," time and space find themselves suspended, borne along on the current of exceptional prose that speaks to what is most important in life.