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

narrative build-up or tension. I cannot make connections between actions and words, can’t recognise motive or discern character. I feel stupid; I’ve found a genre I can’t read.

6

Winter

By November, it’s been winter for a while. We recognise winter not just because the colours of land and sky and sea have changed, although the greens and blues have turned to shades of grey, but because there is less light, even in the middle of the day. The sun rises at a shallower angle every day, every day the zenith is a little lower, every day sunset is a little further south, as if the sun is running out of power. Winter is like watching film shot by natural light, like watching Lars von Trier after Spielberg’s summer. There is snow, and then rain again, and then more snow. The Christmas holiday is shorter in Iceland than at home, and there are no half-term breaks from school, although the International School, true to its American roots, closes for Thanksgiving. Icelanders work now, putting their heads down, getting things done so that when summer returns, when the days begin to lengthen again, we will be able to go out and sit in the sun. I try to remember the midsummer light, and to know that as the days are shortening now they will lengthen after the solstice. Life will come as surely as death. It’s hard to believe, my Arctic theology. Anthony has moments of despair as dark falls earlier and earlier, 4 p.m. at the beginning of November, 2.30 by December. We’re losing, he says, five minutes a day. But those times are sunset, I remind him, not darkness. Winter sunsets, like summer sunrises, go on for hours. The sun sidles over the horizon, but the sky stays pale for a long time. I walk the coast path long after the last light has drained from the sky and think about darkness, and I like it. I like the way it’s impossible to ignore the passing of time. Today is darker than yesterday, tomorrow will be darker than today. Dust we are and to dust we shall return. It makes me feel alive, makes me feel my life like heavy cloth on my hands.

I’m still cycling to work, past the digital thermometers at the roadside reading minus four, minus five, minus six. Sometimes its hard to keep moving fast enough to keep warm enough to keep moving, and I know I’ll have to stop soon, but there’s such pleasure in moving silent and solitary along the edge of the Arctic sea that I want to keep going. The track has down-lights at waist-height, so I can see ice and puddles and stones under the wheel but there’s no glare in my face as I watch the darkness pale and deepen. It’s never really dark, even on a cloudy night. I find myself coming to know the phases of the moon as I know the days of the week or time of the month. I know how the stars wheel through the days and nights.

My last ride is the week before Thanksgiving. It’s nearly 9 a.m. and sunrise is still a couple of hours away. There’s pallor in the south-eastern sky, but out to the north-west, over the sea, the sky is navy, full of cold stars. A full moon seems to have been circling the city for a few days and it rolls out, heading south along the horizon, throwing a shifting pathway over the sea. Everything has a shadow, for the first time in weeks, but they are moonshadows, black on white, and they all point due south, towards that false pink promise behind the mountains.

I’m getting to know my students well now, but there are still surprises. I’m teaching a course on contemporary travel writing. The students aren’t used to studying non-fiction, or contemporary literature, and we’re all enjoying thinking about how much where you come from shapes what you see when you leave. Home, I tell them, is the paper on which travel writes. Travel writers are always writing home. They tell me that the Icelandic for stupid is heimskur, one who stays at home, and that there is a saying: ‘He is as stupid as a child reared at home.’ This is a nation where travel is the precondition of intelligence. But there’s another saying they told me right at the beginning: ‘Iceland is the best in the world.’ Unemployment is highest among ‘foreigners’ because immigrants were the first to be sacked when the kreppa began. The university is on an official mission to enter the top one hundred in the world, and staff and administrators like to hear how things are done in universities that are already in this category, but – as in most large institutions – there are always reasons why nothing can actually change. I find that I am becoming frustrated by the absence of exactly the regulations I thought I was escaping. I don’t understand how the students are supposed to know how to do well when there are no marking criteria, no public statement about the difference between a bare pass and an excellent mark. I am shocked that one of my colleagues assesses his literature courses by multiple-choice exams, so they can be marked by a computer. There is, I discover, after weeks of teaching my own courses by discussion, no tradition of student participation here. My colleagues don’t usually expect the students to use class time for discussion, and spend the weekly hour-and-a-half standing at the front lecturing to rows of quiescent faces. Icelandic students won’t speak in class, my colleagues tell me. It’s not in the culture here, people are too afraid of making fools of themselves. They do for me, I reply, and then realise that since nobody told me otherwise, I have required Icelandic students to behave like British ones. They’ve shared their writing and argued about the meaning of Kubla Khan and