Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

huts. William Morris would have felt at home; there is wood-block wallpaper in shades of duck-egg and storm-grey, polished wooden floorboards and some ornately carved furniture. There are walls of books, including Danish translations of Dickens and Walter Scott, and a music room with a piano. The family lost six of their eleven children in infancy; culture was no protection against the pain of mid-nineteenth-century Icelandic life.

We go up the hill towards the paddle-steamer building, which turns out to be the Library of Water. So many people have told me I must see this that I’m predisposed not to like it. It’s some kind of avant-garde art installation, I gather, with a writing residency attached.

The entrance reminds me of some of the 1960s library buildings I’ve used. There are concrete steps, a glass door, and then a rubber-floored atrium where visitors are asked to remove their shoes and put on white towelling slippers. An American couple are protesting about the slippers, which have been worn by other people, and Tobias shoots past them in his socks and begins to run around. Don’t worry, the curator tells me, children love it here. I step forwards and am silenced. The building has been hollowed out and filled with glass columns containing water from each of Iceland’s glaciers. Even in the rain, light spills not so much across the floor as through the air, as if the building is only a frame for water, glass and air. There are two tables with chessboards in the curved window, and I stand there for a while, looking out at the ordinariness of fishing boats and wet roads and tourists, getting ready to approach the columns again. There is a ping, like someone tapping a glass with a fork to silence wedding guests. Tobias has discovered that the columns make xylo-phone noises when touched. He runs, weaving between the columns, dodging his own reflection so that a running boy flickers through the room, the kind of visual stereo you get in front of a shop window full of televisions. I grab him as he makes for another one. Could we possibly come back later, I ask the curator? Without the children, when things are quieter? Of course, she says. I can stay open late for you if you have some special reason. I’m not sure I do, really, but Guy wants to take photos and I would like to try to write about this space, and in Iceland that’s enough. We return at closing time. When Ragnheiður hears that we know Pétur, are staying in his house, she lets us have the keys and leaves us to play there for as long we like.

I wander between the columns. They look like giant test tubes, reaching from the floor to a white ceiling more than twice an adult height. The floor is rubber in shades of parched earth, terracotta, sand, the red of volcanic soil. Light comes through the glass and the water making lenses of each container, so you see columns of sea, rock and sky with a white bird falling through the water, a red roof and rocks refracted from one column to the next. I can’t decide if the columns are actually lit from below or if it’s just the alchemic relationship between sky, water and glass producing a kind of fission. I expected to find it peaceful here out-of-hours, but it’s not. The columns have things to say to each other, are in a conversation that develops with the changing light. They feel like a forest, like a thicket, with a forest’s sense of unseen eyes. Ragnheiður joked when she discovered we knew Pétur that we could spend the night here if we wanted, but I wouldn’t. It would be like spending the night in a cathedral or in the Black Forest, a place that belongs to other presences after hours.

I sit on the floor, at the columns’ feet. A fly in one of the windows buzzes like a plane taking off. The islands held in the columns in front of me are a mirage. The sea reflected there has the texture of velvet, the rocks are cut from lichen-dyed felt and stuck on. A seagull falls upwards on the other side, but the sea isn’t moving there. The glass tubes gather like people at the kind of party where you stand up with a drink, reflecting each other’s reflections. On the other side of the room, Guy sits on the floor, his camera peering, appearing in four or five places at the same time. I remember travelling with Kathy, the way we could find a place and pace it, sit in it, be in it, until we were ready to go.

We set off early the next morning. We’re going all the way along the peninsula today, creeping around the glacier’s feet. We pass farms in the glacial plain behind the town, and then turn west, across a lava field called Berserkjahraun. Berserkers were Vikings who went into trance-states of indiscriminate and uncontrollable violence, usually in battle, and this lava field is named for two berserkers in Eyrbyggjasaga who were killed here by being boiled in a bath-house built over a geothermal spring. Behind Berserkjahraun is a mountain of dark rock, a black cone reaching from the shore far into the sky, where it seems to close in on another dark mountain to the south. The road runs over a causeway between the two. We go over another causeway, and there is a scattering of farms with green in-fields along the bottom of more of those black mountains. The day passes through landscapes that simply don’t make sense, mountains the mind can’t read. It’s like watching God in the act of creation, passing through fells of bare naked lava and rock, like seeing the world before it was finished. We’re on day four of Creation, moving back towards day three, a world made of sky, fire, earth and water with