He looks out the window and over to Esja mountain again. I can’t blame him. Its permanence is comforting. Then the pensive, calm, thoughtful conversation starts up again.
“It [Esja] is such an ever-changing immutable object: You can read everything into it. You can write any story in there. It changes: the shapes and the figures, depending on how much snow it’s got. It’s just a fascinating thing to stare at for a long time.”
And so we do. After a while, I ask him if he’s ever been up there. He says he hasn’t but always wanted to go. It’s that thing of being too close to something to ever make it happen. But then I have to wonder, is he too close to Iceland or can he still look at it from an outside perspective?
He says he probably understands quite a bit of the nation’s psyche without being completely in it, but rather orbiting it. There’s a thought: the star who orbits Iceland. He came here to chase a very different dream than one of fame or glory – instead, he was looking for black-sand beaches and tranquility. He tells me the story – how he saw, on TV, a vista he’d only seen in his subconscious, of a black-sand beach and crashing waves. And knew it was where he belonged.
“I’ve always found it [this feeling of belonging somewhere] interesting. We don’t have a word for it in English but they have one in Portuguese: saudade. And in German I think it’s Sehnsucht, which means a feeling for something that you haven’t actually experienced, but you know is part of you.”