above the Pole. Icelanders will tell you that, because of the North Atlantic Drift, the country has no extremes of temperature: many years see no snow at all in Reykjavik, and the lowest temperature recorded in the capital in thirty years is — 15° Fahrenheit. But no extremes of temperature, in my book, means that it is never, ever warm. In summer, when I visited, people were complaining of a heat wave when the temperature hit a chilly 54°; by early fall, bitter winds were whipping through the silent streets, slapping my face and almost knocking me off my feet. A local friend told me that he had been to Stockholm once and almost suffocated in the sweltering 64° heat. He couldn’t wait, he said, to “get back to my cold Iceland.”
In such an unaccommodating world, it is not surprising that visitors are often as unorthodox, in their way, as locals. (“Whenever I meet a foreigner here,” an Icelandic girl told me in a disco, “I ask him, ‘Why do you come to Iceland?’ It is cold; it is expensive; and the people, they are closed.”) Yet the country seems to bring out something pure in visitors, something a little bit out of the ordinary. The most luminous translations of modern Icelandic poetry into English, for example, were composed by a recent U.S. ambassador to Iceland, Marshall Brement, who has written beautifully of how Icelanders were the great European poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and how even now, on one night a year, every member of Parliament must speak in rhyme. And though the island’s attraction to photographers (Eliot Porter) and to poets (from Auden and MacNeice to Leithauser) may be self-evident, it seems to evoke something poetic even in an everyman. I once asked a young Danish student, who had chosen to live here for a year, what was the most exciting thing to do in Reykjavik. He thought for a long, long time. Then, a little sheepish, he replied, “Well, for me, I like walking at night in the Old Town, seeing the old houses. Or if you can go a little bit out of Reykjavik, if it is cold, like tonight, you can see the northern lights.” The most beautiful place he had ever seen, he said, was Greenland. “It is so rich, in many ways. When you walk there, you see more clearly, you think more easily. Here it is a little bit the same.”
That kind of calm transparency is, inevitably, harder and harder to maintain as the villages of Iceland get drawn into the shrinking global village. For ten centuries now, the island has preserved its own culture and its Old Norse diphthongs by living apart from the world, remote from changing realities. For centuries, Iceland has been a kind of hermit among nations, a private, inward-looking Lonely Place of fishermen and visionariesand poets. The pursuits for which it has been famous are largely solitary ones, made to ward off months of winter dark: thus the land with a population smaller than that of Corpus Christi, Texas, boasts six chess grandmasters and recently placed first in the World Contract Bridge Championship. The most famous Icelander in England, Magnus Magnusson, is, appropriately enough, the host of a fiendishly difficult quiz show,
Mastermind
(there are now fifty-three Magnus Magnussons in the country’s phone book). Iceland is a kind of conscientious objector to modernity, out of it in all the right ways and priding itself on being a sort of no-man’s-land in the middle of nowhere (and nowhen), a quiet neutral zone far from superpower rivalries: midway between Moscow and Manhattan, halfway between medievalism and modernity, it had its two moments of ambiguous fame—in 1972, when it was the site of the Boris Spassky-Bobby Fischer chess championship, and in 1986, when it was the safe house where Reagan and Gorbachev met and almost abandoned nuclear weapons. The miracle of Iceland is not just that, as Auden wrote, “any average educated person one meets can turn out competent verse” (and a kitchen maid he met gave “an
In such an unaccommodating world, it is not surprising that visitors are often as unorthodox, in their way, as locals. (“Whenever I meet a foreigner here,” an Icelandic girl told me in a disco, “I ask him, ‘Why do you come to Iceland?’ It is cold; it is expensive; and the people, they are closed.”) Yet the country seems to bring out something pure in visitors, something a little bit out of the ordinary. The most luminous translations of modern Icelandic poetry into English, for example, were composed by a recent U.S. ambassador to Iceland, Marshall Brement, who has written beautifully of how Icelanders were the great European poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and how even now, on one night a year, every member of Parliament must speak in rhyme. And though the island’s attraction to photographers (Eliot Porter) and to poets (from Auden and MacNeice to Leithauser) may be self-evident, it seems to evoke something poetic even in an everyman. I once asked a young Danish student, who had chosen to live here for a year, what was the most exciting thing to do in Reykjavik. He thought for a long, long time. Then, a little sheepish, he replied, “Well, for me, I like walking at night in the Old Town, seeing the old houses. Or if you can go a little bit out of Reykjavik, if it is cold, like tonight, you can see the northern lights.” The most beautiful place he had ever seen, he said, was Greenland. “It is so rich, in many ways. When you walk there, you see more clearly, you think more easily. Here it is a little bit the same.”
That kind of calm transparency is, inevitably, harder and harder to maintain as the villages of Iceland get drawn into the shrinking global village. For ten centuries now, the island has preserved its own culture and its Old Norse diphthongs by living apart from the world, remote from changing realities. For centuries, Iceland has been a kind of hermit among nations, a private, inward-looking Lonely Place of fishermen and visionariesand poets. The pursuits for which it has been famous are largely solitary ones, made to ward off months of winter dark: thus the land with a population smaller than that of Corpus Christi, Texas, boasts six chess grandmasters and recently placed first in the World Contract Bridge Championship. The most famous Icelander in England, Magnus Magnusson, is, appropriately enough, the host of a fiendishly difficult quiz show,
Mastermind
(there are now fifty-three Magnus Magnussons in the country’s phone book). Iceland is a kind of conscientious objector to modernity, out of it in all the right ways and priding itself on being a sort of no-man’s-land in the middle of nowhere (and nowhen), a quiet neutral zone far from superpower rivalries: midway between Moscow and Manhattan, halfway between medievalism and modernity, it had its two moments of ambiguous fame—in 1972, when it was the site of the Boris Spassky-Bobby Fischer chess championship, and in 1986, when it was the safe house where Reagan and Gorbachev met and almost abandoned nuclear weapons. The miracle of Iceland is not just that, as Auden wrote, “any average educated person one meets can turn out competent verse” (and a kitchen maid he met gave “an
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