I’m having trouble finding a way to stay, hold things together. This isn’t the place for it. Things are too close yet nowhere near enough. ‘The frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness’, says Heidegger. The world is zooming into non-places. Pictures of everything from remote solar systems to the closest burger bar blend into a kind of uniform mirage, as if all distances have been conquered and it no longer matters what you look at.
*
On a whim, while watching a new Faroese-Danish crime drama on TV, I buy a plane ticket to the Faroe Islands and book an Airbnb. I get the second-last seat on the plane. I imagine other Danes got the same idea.
Almost shocking to see the massive grassy rocks loom out of the Atlantic. I take a bus from the airport, get settled with my hosts and the next day, after a short ferry ride from the harbour, I’m finally alone on the fells of Nólsoy island, above a small village of two hundred souls, in the rain and wind. Quite alone with the sheep and the birds. No sounds but those nature produces. The wind blows to a gale, the rain comes down hard, and I retreat, sodden, to the village pub. The late ferries might be cancelled, the bartender tells me, you better take the next one. He tells me some local lore and we smoke in his garage until I have to go to the harbour, bent over against the storm.
Next day to Kirkjubøur, with its bare, fourteenth-century church and a path beneath the cliffs. The weather and therefore the landscape changes by the hour. Sunny now, misty peaks in the distance. There’s no point taking pictures any longer. The next view is always bigger, more indifferent, more present. You don’t have to work at being in the moment here, the place seems to do it for you. It’s overwhelmingly clear how little say you have, how small you are. I cup my hands and drink from the little waterfalls that tumble down the cliffs. It tastes of rock, earth and grass.
Everyone here speaks Danish, the colonial language that was imposed on them – Faroese was forbidden in schools – but no one seems hostile when I address them. I barely understand their ancient language. It’s a mix of Norse and Irish, I read on Wikipedia. There’s something very old here I don’t understand. The people are different too, not at all like Copenhageners. I’d need more than a week to begin to let it sink in. I go back to Nólsoy to see the cliffs where the European storm-petrels roost: nightbirds that migrate as far as Africa. On the way back to the ferry I stop at the pub to chat with the bartender again. I ask him what they really think of us. He says, They often come here in their suits, with precise instructions, project schedules, and so on. You have to be here and here at such and such a time. We listen politely, then go away and do things at our own pace. We listen more to the weather, he says.
Notes from a Room 