“If you’re wearing a jacket, you might want to take it off. It will get hot in here.”
We’re sitting in a circle in a dark room with two dozen others. A magician has promised to show us a great wonder: liquid fire from a hundred miles or more beneath the earth’s surface. I’m still wondering if this is one of those attractions where the advertisements are better than the real thing.
I don’t take off my jacket.
“Land of Fire and Ice” sounds like a riff on a Game of Thrones novel title. But I think Iceland proves that God is irresponsible with his gifts, casually tossing so much gold before swine and insisting that we are not swine.
Iceland is overburdened by beauty. My sister and I spent six days on the island, and its vastness, its perilousness, and barrenness haunt me. Also haunting me: the number of times my phone said “signal lost” as we drove a rented hybrid with questionable gas mileage through mountain vistas and along the edge of the sea.
As we strolled the shores of lakes the color of mist-strewn skies, my thoughts rejoined on two themes: the longing for Northernness that C. S. Lewis wrote of so poignantly in Surprised by Joy and the feeling of being a foreigner in a foreign land. Not a “foreign land” in the sense of it being foreign to me (or me being a foreigner in it), but a land that possesses the quality of foreignness within itself. It made me think of Elwin Ransom and his interplanetary travels in the Field of Arbol, described in Lewis’ Space Trilogy.
Read the full piece in Plough.