Day 26 Monday in Reykjavík - Harpa, the Harbor, Landakotskirkja, Elliðaárdalur

Our last full day in Europe! (If, that is, you include Iceland in Europe -- which is really a challenging thing to do once you’ve been there.)

Our last day was very low-key and leisurely.

We started off by enjoying the interior of the Harpa, another controversial architectural wonder of Iceland. In this case, the controversy was largely around the cost of the concert hall given the economic crisis that hit Iceland in 2008-2011.

Apart from its timing, I can’t imagine this having been controversial in Iceland, however. Like the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Harpa is a public space that is centered around the performing arts. A coffee shop and spacious interior provide a place for tourists, readers and casual visitors all day long. It seems perfect for Iceland.

From the Harpa we walked down to the main harbor of Reykjavík, which revealed another side of Iceland altogether. Icelandic fisheries compose over a quarter of Iceland’s GDP. It was great to get a little glimpse of the blue-collar industry there in the harbor.

The next visit of the day was to Landakotskirkja, formerly Christ the King Cathedral -- the only Roman Catholic church in Iceland. When I first encountered Hallgrímskirkja, I assumed that it was a distinctively Northern Protestant aesthetic I was encountering -- with a particularly modernist flavor. But here was a Roman Catholic cathedral predating Hallgrímskirkja by approximately fifty years that looked cut from the same stone!

I would later learn that Landakotskirkja and Hallgrímskirkja were in fact designed by the same architect -- Guðjón Samúelsson, one of the state architects of Iceland. But one way or the other, whatever aesthetic was acceptable to those who commissioned Hallgrímskirkja was also previously acceptable for the small number of Roman Catholics in Iceland.

The last major site we visited in Iceland was described as a hidden gem of Reykjavík -- Elliðaárdalur park. This was one of the purely leisurely portions of the trip, strolling through an urban reserve with wildflowers, trees, and the salmon filled pools of the Ellidaár river.

The kids ran on ahead and hid in various places, waiting for us to walk by without seeing them. We paused at a large pool. Enjoyed some familiar and some unfamiliar flora.

The river seemed to be at a low or moderate flow, but nonetheless we happened upon a fisherman at one of the pools who caught a salmon on a fly. I seriously considered getting a license. Dietrich found a recently dead salmon (maybe a fishing kill) and when he held it up with a club in his hand to make a joke drew more attention than we were hoping for.

We took the bus back to the motel, and Jen and I went strolling in downtown Reykjavík for one last European evening.

Day 26 Reflection

You could argue that going to a park like Elliðaárdalur is a waste of one’s precious time in a foreign land.

After all, in one sense, this is an experience that can be replicated in any major urban area that has maintained even some dim connection to the living world beneath and before it. I experience something like Elliðaárdalur every time I make the hike from Minnehaha Falls to the Mississippi River. I have experienced this in a slightly different way in places as diverse as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and San Antonio. There is nothing genuinely unique about Elliðaárdalur.

But it is not the idiosyncratic alone that one goes in search of when one travels. It is also the universal -- the familiar smell of the city receding, flowers uncontained by neat garden walls, the Icelandic fisherman’s joy in his catch so like my joy, a joy even deeper than the catch.

As Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It:

“I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”

Perhaps I should save anything more for a final reflection upon Europe.

Click Here to View Slideshow

Day 25 - Sunday in Reykjavík - Hallgrímskirkja, Hellisgerði, Hólavallagarður (with allusions to Gullfoss and Geysir)

I woke up early Sunday morning and walked around the town -- our hotel was just to the east of the main part of Reykjavík on Rauðarárstígur. (Doesn’t that just make you want to learn Icelandic?)

First a note of delight -- discovering that the thorn (þ) and eth (ð) remain as characters in the alphabet! (They also have the ash (æ) which isn’t quite as interesting, because it’s also in Latin.)

When I teach Beowulf to students I introduce them to a little bit about genuine Old English and talk about the thorn and the eth -- which roughly equate to our two different ways of pronouncing “th” -- as we do in ‘with’ (unvoiced) and as we do in ‘then’ (voiced). The ‘th’ in ‘with’ is roughly equivalent to the thorn (þ) and the ‘th’ in ‘then’ roughly equivalent to the eth (ð). See the sign below for their presence in the icelandic language:

One surprising discovery of being out at at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning was that there were still people up from the night before!

Partly because of their extreme relationship to the sun, to light and darkness, and to summer and winter, Reykjavík night life does not begin to heat up until around 11:30 p.m. So at 6:00 a.m. the streets were quiet but not yet empty of revelers. Most people had gone home, but there were still a few quiet clusters of people drinking beer and smoking as the sun came up on the city -- much as you might find some people still sitting on a park bench at 2:30 or 3:00 am in a major European or American city after others had called it a night.

Wandering around, I noticed that Reykjavík is filled with street art and public art -- so much so that the two seem to blend into one another. It’s difficult to tell what might be commissioned and what has just been added to the common life of the city without, so to speak, permission.

This morning ramble was also the first time I walked up to the Hallgrímskirkja -- the somewhat controversial church that dominates any view of Reykjavík. It’s an amazing piece of modernist-expressionist architecture with it’s overall gray, minimal landscaping and stunning carven door. I didn’t have a chance to go in that morning, but did come back later to check out the interior.

I also discovered that there are a number of wonderful bookstores in Iceland, both new and used. The bookstores in Iceland are everything you would want them to be -- legitimate places to hang out and think, jumbles of ideas old and new. 

Here was one sign I really liked:

After I got back to the hotel from wandering, we split up for the day, as we had done several times on this European jaunt.

Gramps, Grams, Dietrich and Anna went by bus to the spectacular Gullfoss and Geysir -- both features of the Continental Rift. I don’t have any pictures of my own, but the ones I saw made me half regret that I hadn’t made the trip! Here are a couple of pictures from the internet:

Gullfoss

Geysir

Meanwhile, Jen, Emily, Nora, Charis and I took a much shorter bus ride to Hellisgerði park in Hafnarfjordur -- home of the Elf Garden!

In order to get a sense for the Elf Garden, you have to understand that somewhere around half of the Icelanders do actually believe in elves, or the Huldufólk (“hidden people”). For reasons I don’t entirely understand and that are apparently somewhat sensitive with respect to “outsiders,” so many icelanders believe in elves that it is an issue when new construction threatens traditional elf dwellings.

The Elf Garden in Hafnarfjordur is full of volcanic rocks covered in green mosses and grasses, sparse Icelandic trees, and semi-groomed paths. It was easy to see how, if you believe in hidden people (of which more later), this is where they would live.

After walking around the Elf Garden we spent a little more time in Hafnarfjordur -- got coffee in a coffeeshop, walked around the shops and towns. Some of the pictures included in the slideshow are of the local architecture.

We took the bus back to Reykjavík, got an ice cream, and walked back towards the motel.

On our way, we discovered the Hólavallagarður cemetery -- probably one of the most naturally beautiful and powerful cemeteries I have been in, comparable to the great cemeteries of New Orleans.

We first encountered it as as what seemed to be a walled garden, with occasional gates that seemed closed, but eventually found our way in.

Each plot in the cemetery really has a distinct sense of it’s own space, with a boundary, often a tree, and some very unique headstones or standing stones. The layout is labyrinthine and idiosyncratic. It would be easy to get lost. I thought of how much my mother would probably have enjoyed it.

Like the cemeteries in New Orleans, the place really does feel like a city of the dead. Only here at Hólavallagarður, it is more like a partially kept-up ghost town where the trees and other flora are given free reign. There’s a connection between this approach to cemeteries and the belief in elves. I’m almost certain. The two sites felt absolutely akin to one another.

In fact, there is an Icelandic legend that the first person buried in a cemetery does not rot, but becomes the guardian of the cemetery. In this case, that is Guðrún Oddsdóttir.

If we would have stayed longer in Iceland, I would have certainly spent more time photographing this spot.

One interesting sidenote from this excursion, we discovered the self-cleaning public toilet. The ones in Iceland are not much larger than a portable outhouse here, but when you exit, the door closes and it does some sort of legitimate wet cleaning cycle!

Really a great idea.

Public toilets are so gross in the United States.

Day 25 Reflection One

I really appreciated the sense that Icelanders have for the place of art in their civic life.

In spirit, it reminded me a little bit of some of the “artsy” corners of American and European cities I’ve been in (Lowertown St. Paul, Uptown Minneapolis, the Southbank of London) but on a much more all pervasive scale -- as if the “arts” were not a corner of the civic life, or a destination, but essential to the fabric of civic life. This was one of the more impressive aspects of Iceland.

The same could be said of the bookstore and fashion cultures of Iceland. They are not segregated into subcultures or corners of the city, but are simply a part of a widely shared way of life.

Of course, all of these are in part made possible by Iceland’s intensely cautious immigration policies and consequent homogeneity.

Day 25 Reflection Two

It’s time I confess.

I too believe in elves.

But before you write me off entirely as a nutcase, hear me out.

As an orthodox Christian, I do not, in fact, cannot buy into the disenchantment of the world.

Max Webber wrote in “Science as a Vocation:”

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.”

It is no longer considered credible or respectable to believe in supernatural causes -- or at least not to talk about them publicly. We have entered, in Charles Taylor’s language, a “secular age.”

But I think that orthodox Christians have responsibility to reject the thinking of a thoroughly secular age and to embrace, to a significant extent, a pre-Enlightenment openness to causes and realities that cannot be proven or demonstrated scientifically, accepting along with this the consequence of being thought “unenlightened” by secular peers.

Let me illustrate.

As an orthodox Christian, I believe in “angels.”

In the Jewish scriptures, these beings went by several names including mal'āk̠ 'ĕlōhîm (messenger of God), mal'āk̠ YHWH (messenger of the Lord), bənē 'ĕlōhîm (sons of God), haqqôd̠əšîm (the holy ones), ’ir (watcher) and hā'elyônîm (the upper ones).

I believe these beings are possessed of personality, will and power.

I believe they can have a range of actual effects in the natural world.

I believe they can appear as to human beings in a sensible form.

I also believe that some angels, like some humans, turned away from God. They became what we call ‘demons’ or ‘false gods.’

I believe these fallen angels have all the same metaphysical qualities of the angels, but have lost their status as messengers of God.

I believe that they too have personality, will and power, can affect the natural world, and can appear to human beings in a sensible form.

I also believe that these demons desire to possess or inhabit this world rather than be cast out of it. The story of Jesus casting the demons into pigs (Matthew 8:28-34) is noteworthy.

I believe they are capable of masquerading successfully as benevolent.

I also believe that they, mixed in with man-made superstition, are the true origin of pagan gods.

Taking this all together, it is absolutely no stretch at all for me to think  that among these beings I believe in as an orthodox Biblically informed Christian are some that would be encountered as the Icelandic Huldufólk.

Metaphysically, I can see absolutely no distinction between the Huldufolk (or other European versions of the elves) and what I would call lesser demons, mixed with some local superstition regarding their habits and behavior.

So there you have it.

I believe in Elves.

Click here to begin Slideshow

Day 24 -- Travel from Paris to Reykjavík

Saturday and one more day of travel!

This time it was up bright and early for the flight from Charles de Gaulle to Reykjavík’s Keflavík International Airport. And so began one of the most surprising episodes in this European trip.

I knew just a little bit about Reykjavík and the island nation of Iceland from a friend who had spent his honeymoon there and from what little I could glean from the likes of Björk and Sigur Rós. I had been to one of the latter’s concerts at Roy Wilkins Auditorium and it was one of the few events in my life up to this point that I would describe as genuinely ethereal.

I also knew that Iceland had almost zero violent crime and even petty theft was rare -- to the point that parents leave their children unattended, bicycles are not locked up and hitchhiking is a perfectly acceptable form of transportation.

I also knew that the Icelandic language was Tolkien’s model for elvish.

But nothing really prepared me for the strange reality of the place.

Even the drive from the airport to downtown Reykjavík bespoke an alienness. Outside the window of the bus was a landscape treeless and volcanic yet somehow still lush. Small, bright houses with corrugated metal roofing popped out from amongst the black and green. The sky was overcast, but not gloomy.

When we arrived in Reykjavík there was not a lot of time left in the day. We got dinner at Piccolo Italia, a small Italian restaurant run by a man from, I believe it was Sicily (maybe Crete). And we did get to wander around Laugavegur street, the main retail shopping stretch in Reykjavík.

The highlight of this particular walk was the discovery of a used clothing store in the basement off the street.

There was no storefront, but just a small rack out front and a sandwich board pointing to an entrance to the downstairs. Inside things were sort of a jumble. Shoes here and there, coats in various places -- the sort of place you could tell was not manicured for chic customers (though a couple of the “vintage” clothing stores in Reykjavik very clearly were).

It was just Dietrich and I and once we got in we met the magical proprietor of the place. He looked and behaved just as I imagine Mr. Ollivander in the Harry Potter books.

The man was fussy, had a fine sense of taste, and keenly wanted to match a piece of clothing with Dietrich. He knew where everything was, and would go find it for you if you asked. He helped Dietrich try things on, gave him advice on fit, turned some pieces down.

It was marvelous!

My only regret was that we really couldn’t find anything that both worked and was affordable. We really did try.

Before turning in for the night after such an early morning, we stopped by a neighborhood concert. The band set up on a small stage, people gathered around socializing, and the band played their music. Some wandered in and out, others were more set on staying. Kids played around at the front of the stage.

This sort of thing seems that these are a staple of Reykjavik society and characteristic of the culture that we saw in the time were there.

Day 24 Reflection

All proprietors should be as that nameless man operating the nameless store that we walked into to shop for clothes.

He was a connoisseur without snobbery, an eccentric gentleman perhaps fallen on harder times, but still so obviously dedicated both to the things and to the people in his immediate care.

There is, of course, much to object to in Karl Marx’s thought and especially in the development of the only communist regimes we have ever known.

However, the rarity of something like this gentleman’s demeanor does point to something Marx got right in the broken relationship we have to our labor -- perhaps even more so in the 21st century consumerist culture.

“In what consists this ‘alienation,’” Marx asks. “First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.”

I do believe Marx’s critique of our relationship to our work is accurate. It accounts for everything from TGIF to the mess our educational system is in, where what should be an intrinsically satisfying activity (learning about the world in which we live) has become a means to getting a job.

I do not agree with Marx’s solution.

Rather, I think we have to make an effort to be like this man in the small basement shop in Reykjavik.

Click Here for Slideshow

Day 23 -- Travel from Normandie to Roissy-en-France, Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen

Friday was a travel day from Normandie to Roissy-en-France, a northern suburb or Paris right near the airport from which we would be leaving the next day.

On the way back towards paris we stopped off to each lunch in Rouen and to visit the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen. Rouen was only slightly off our route, and given an early attraction to it in art history class and Monet’s series of atmospheric paintings, I really wanted to see it.

Both the stonework and the brickwork on this Gothic cathedral were among the most impressive we saw while in Europe.

In order to get ready to leave the next day, Jen, Erick and Mary dropped the rest of the family off at the motel at Roissy-en-France and then drove into Paris to drop off the car (which was apparently an adventure involving long waits, steep ramps, drug users in a stairwell and smell of urine and defecation).

After everyone was back at Roissy-en-France, there was not a lot of time to explore, but I did go out in the evening for some photography opportunities. Roissy is essentially a modern, upper-middle class French suburb with a lot of hotels due to its location near the airport.

After having spent so much time in old cities and villages, it was somewhat odd to be in a place where little seemed old at all.

Day 23 Reflection

Thinking about the difference between the well-polished Roissy-en-France and the quiddities of Parisian Cafés, crumbling Norman churches, and even London canal boats, I was reminded of this quote from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often.”

There is obviously nothing wrong with new things. Every old thing was once new.

But perhaps the attractiveness of old things is that, just like a man or woman who has grown wise, older things and older places are more experienced at being in the world. They have acquired quality, texture and pores in Bradbury’s sense.