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

an important church, but by the eighteenth century it was a school serving the elite families of the area, the big farmers and landowners. The tea-bowl is broken, and you can see the point of impact on the side, where the fragments get smaller, like an eggshell newly knocked against the bowl. Some smaller pieces are still missing, leaving jagged holes. It is a sandy, reddish brown on the outside, glazed white on the inside with blue flowers, maybe some kind of blossom on a stem, painted where it would waver under milkless tea. There is no blossom in Iceland. Fashionable across Europe in the C18, the label says, but with no explanation of how or why this particular piece crossed the North Atlantic at the end of its journey from China. It was made for export, mass-produced, but still, of course, hand-painted; transfer-printing came later. These flowers were painted quickly, on some kind of assembly line. I have little sense of who and where in China was making this stuff, but some hand cupped that bowl, dipped a brush and shaped a stalk, a few blooms, put it down and picked up another. And then the bowl made its way across to the nearest port, and over the sea, almost certainly to England, and then back to sea, to Iceland, to the see of Skálholt, where it was used (probably) and dropped (certainly) and lay in the ground until 2002. There’s no reason, I remind myself, why eighteenth-century Icelanders shouldn’t have had porcelain and tea just as in the drawing rooms of Regency London, and the same layer held broken Dutch clay pipes, jet rosary beads and signet rings, making it clear that Icelanders had plenty of imported goods. But none of them, I think, are things that you would lose lightly, or without remembering, and being upset. Someone must have sworn, and prodded the bruise of his or her clumsiness in the night.

In the next case, from the floor of the first printing house in Iceland, less than a century after Gutenberg, there is what the label calls a ‘knitted sock’. It looks more like a slipper than a modern sock, boat-shaped, heavy enough to hold its rounded shape three hundred years later in a glass case. It is worn through at the heel. Not where modern socks wear out, where the top of the shoe rubs, but under the heel, where the foot falls first and heaviest. The stitches are tiny, dense; it must have been knitted on very small needles, and the wool is thick enough that this would have been difficult. I remember the easy, swimming motion of Icelandic knitters, and think that this was harder work than that. The sock is a grubby beige now, darker around the sole, dark with sweat three centuries old. When it was made it was a creamy brown, oatmeal. Everything, then, was made for someone, for and by a particular person. The sock is smaller than my outstretched hand, about Max’s size.

Back in the classroom, I ask the students what they thought of the museum. It made me proud, says Arni, because I was thinking about these museums in Europe, the Louvre and especially the British Museum, and most of the exhibits don’t come from those countries. European museums are full of stuff stolen from other countries. Ours is simpler, we don’t have the Roman statues or the Egyptian scrolls or whatever, but we made it all ourselves. There is no stealing. Yes, says Hrafnhildur, at first I was a little ashamed. I was remembering the big museum I saw in New York and thinking that we have nothing so important, but that is because we are a small nation and we have never had any colonies or empire and we have not wiped out anyone who was here before us. I was looking, she says, at this carved door from the thirteenth century, from a church. She holds up a postcard. It is – she pauses at a new word – Romanesque. I do not know what that means, but it is like the European carving at that time, and it was done here in Iceland, look, with a knight, and a falcon, and a dragon. A French story, told in an Icelandic way by an Icelandic craftsman, because even then we knew what was happening in Europe but we did things our own way. Everyone nods and murmurs agreement. Yes, says Rosa, I liked the carvings from the eighteenth-century church. If you think of St Paul’s in London or of course the churches of Venice from this time, these are nothing, they are the scribbles of a young child. But they are not made to intimidate. They are to please, not to make you feel small, and these were buildings to hold perhaps four or five families from the valley when they could come together. No great nobleman paid and no great artist was commissioned, and in a way I am proud of this.

I like the way they’ve come up with a post-colonial reading of great museums, but I notice again that the first reaction is shame or pride, fear of losing face in the eyes of the world and then pride in independence and simplicity. I’ve sometimes looked at the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum and thought that they are nothing but heaps of loot, but I don’t feel enough ownership to be ashamed. My national identity seems to me accidental, a source of neither pleasure nor pain. Everyone must have one. I associate the kind of national feeling which seems normal for Icelanders with earlier ages in Britain. None of the English people I know would hear ‘unpatriotic’ as an insult.

I still have not had my job interview in Singapore. I explain to the professor across the world the difficulties of leaving Iceland at the moment, that the ash blows either over Iceland, so I can’t get to a European hub