North of William Heinesen

I live in that part of the world where I haven't been.

That's why I like to read and write and travel to places that cause people to ask me, "why are you going there?" I know I'm going to the right place when I don't know what to say, I don't have a good answer.

In southeast Iceland in mid-September I floated among the ice-bergs on Jokulsarion lagoon, half freshwater and half icewater. The boatman spoke Icelandic English, so that I could understand every other word hesaid. He said that if anyone fell in the water, he or she should make sure to relax and enjoy the experience as she or he would have less than a minute to live.

On Mainland Orkney, the confusing name of the largest of the Orkney Islands, I walked through many fields occupied mostly by sheep and cows. Wherever I am I'm always impressed by the passivity and good nature of the animals, particularly the cows. Walking near Orphir, an ancient parish and settlement, I started to write a poem:

      The world would be better

      if we could learn to be like cows

Which my walking partner completed by saying,

      but then we'd only be

      like the cows.

In Stromness, population 2,200, second largest town on the mainland, there's a fine bookstore, the equal of any I've been in anywhere. I asked the owner if there was an organizing principle to the collection. He said yes, and that he'd give me a few moments to figure it out.

He'd known George Mackay Brown, "saw him every day." I'd found a book of Mackay's early short stories, A Time to Keep, at the inn and wanted to read more. The bookseller put Hawkfall in my hands. Then he said, "have you read William Heinesen?"

"Don't know him," I said. "You should," he said.

Heinesen was a Faroe Islander, wrote in Danish, a painter, composer, and writer, the bookseller said, telling this story: 

On Heinesen's 80th birthday he was told there was to be a big fete in his honor. "Will the Finns be there," he asked, "the Danes, the English, the Germans...?" He was assured they'd all be there. "Will television be covering the event?" he asked. Yes of course televsion will be covering such an important ceremony he was told. "Then I'll stay home and watch it on television."

I'm reading The Lost Musicians, Heinesen's masterwork, for the second time after buying it from the bookseller in Stromness. It's a book full of the north, takes me back and forth between the places I've just visited and places I've never been, with one sentence after another as good as this--

      He wished it was morning already, and that it could always be light and like everyday so that the     world could really be allowed to fall into place and become ordinary.