The pier in C… is the longest pier in Poland: it cuts deep into the bay, and its dark wooden balks, somewhat rotted and decaying on the underside, supported on rather dubious-looking, water-eroded piles driven into the sea bed, nonetheless form an entirely safe platform bounded by a white rail, allowing people to walk out over the waters of the Baltic, choppy, grey-green, and foamy at this time of year, with the seagulls bobbing contentedly on the waves, as if reclining in an armchair, entirely impervious to the constant rolling and pitching […]. If one passes to the right-hand-side railing, what one sees closest at hand, sprawling over the dirty yellow of the beach, is the hotel – spreading like some vast, wealthy magnate’s manor, comprising a central section and symmetrical lateral wing segments fused to either side […].
C…, the most popular beach resort in Poland, where December in the now deserted Creative Retreat enables one to listen not only to the murmur or roar of the northern sea, just a hundred and fifty yards away, but equally to oneself, a self which had somehow seemed absent for so many years. […] The true, more profound, picturesque attractiveness of C… is only revealed out of season, when in the apparent emptiness and quiet one can hear the real breath of the place, and sense the ambience of its history, its situation, and its elemental base, rather than the artificially created atmospheric backdrop, in both its human and non-human facets.
Stefan Kisielewski
