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

fought over Austen’s feminism. If Háskóli Íslands wants to play with Europe’s universities, some things will have to change, and everyone is interested to know what those things are. As soon as anyone mentions ‘abroad’, útlönd, the outlands, in a meeting, people fall silent and take notes, as if it’s self-evident that what happens í útlöndum is exemplary, as if Iceland’s self-esteem depends on its ability to mimic foreign ways. But when I suggest that we might actually follow examples of other practices – double marking, for example, or a system of external examination so that someone from another institution would confirm that what we are doing meets accepted standards – I’m told that it’s not possible to do things differently here, because this is Iceland, and the reason I don’t understand this impossibility must be that I am a foreigner. Foreigners may know how to do things abroad, but only Icelanders understand Iceland. This country seems both outward-looking and insular, a nation of deeply provincial voyagers. ‘Insular’, Pétur reminds me, is the adjectival form of ‘island’, and not incompatible with ‘well-travelled’. I try, and fail, to explain to the students why English has two words for ‘foreign’ and ‘outlandish’.

We’ve been reading Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory and talking about how to write about rivers. Raban takes a small boat down the Mississippi, inspired by his childhood reading of Huckleberry Finn. I talk about Three Men in a Boat, and about the rivers in The Waste Land. The students discuss the idea of the river as highway and border, taking people and goods up and down but keeping them apart. I know by now to assume no limit to their geographical experience. Juliána, who lived in Paris for a year, talks about city rivers, the Rive Gauche: the river as socio-economic boundary. Ólafur remembers how New York used to pretend its river wasn’t there when he was a child: the river as sewer, taking away sins. Jón fishes in the river that crosses his family farm every summer, joining his father, brothers and male cousins in a ritual of returning to the land and to primitivist masculinity after nine months of urban professional life: a river of (seasonal) plenty. The discussion is going well, but they’re ignoring Raban’s encounters with people on and near the river, and I realise that we’ve talked a lot about landscape this term and hardly mentioned inhabitants. What about the way he writes about meeting strangers? I ask. How does that feel, when you’re travelling and you start to hear people’s stories? How does Jonathan Raban use strangers’ tales?

There’s a silence. I wait. The silence goes on. Find an example, I suggest, and they ruffle pages obediently. But they are exchanging glances, in a way that usually means the crazy foreigner is at it again. Maybe we should write about encounters with strangers this week, I say, practise telling second-hand stories. I can hear the intake of breath. OK, I say, tell me. What have I said? The Danish student and the Americans are looking around, as puzzled as I am. Yeah, says Rosa, it’s weird, isn’t it, the way some people will just, like, talk to strangers. Like, people they’ve never met before in their entire lives. Oskar nods. My great-aunt’s like that, he says. But then she is Danish. She’ll just start talking about the weather or something. In a shop. He shudders. Really? asks Disa. Really people she’s never even met? In the city? Yeah, says Oskar, shaking his head, as if the Danish great-aunt is in the habit of pinching policemen’s bottoms or drinking on the steps of parliament. Like in America, adds Ólafur, they’ll tell you anything. It’s just embarrassing.

Icelanders, it turns out, don’t chat to shopkeepers, or complain to each other when the bus is late (though it isn’t, usually), or exchange comments about the weather. There is outright mutiny when I suggest that those who have never spoken to a stranger should go out and do so as part of this week’s writing exercise. In the end, the international students all turn in elegant little vignettes about finding that the other person on the train was going to the same ballet for the same reason, or about being invited to stay with the person in the next seat on the plane, while the Icelanders write about rivers. I wonder if part of the anxiety about ‘strangers’ is that Icelandic social and familial bonds are so dense that there aren’t many strangers, that, like Jewish people from the same English town or Oxford graduates of the same cohort, any two Icelanders will eventually be able to name a common acquaintance and so the only true ‘strangers’ are foreign. In any case, I am gratified to have found people keener on minding their own business than the British.

One of my students comes to find me after class, a British woman who, like most of the immigrants we know, fell in love with an Icelander in London and found, a few years later, that he couldn’t conceive of raising a family outside Iceland. (I sometimes think that all these beautiful, intelligent, multilingual twenty-something Icelanders with a sideways take on the world ought to come with a health warning when they arrive in London and New York and Buenos Aires: marry at your peril, for the útlönd years are just a phase. The rest of the world is only a finishing school for Icelandic graduates.) Charlotte’s outsider status in Reykjavík is doubled because she is black. The first few times she visited her husband’s family, she says, people used to turn around in the street to watch her go past. Children would hide and point. When she was driving one day and saw another black driver at a traffic light, they waved and smiled in astonishment and it took her only two days to find out who the other person was. That was ten years ago, she says, and it’s better now. She