Free The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit Page B

world, of chairs, of houses, of bombs, of books, of blood, of gods. Making a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.
    The young man kept making, made music, worked on films, loved, was loved back, struggled, traveled, endured for a while. About a quarter million people a year are diagnosed with leukemia, the disease that impairs or alters the making of the blood. I did not know the young wolf who died of it, and I did not know of his existence until after I went to Iceland, but he became a key that unlocked a door of my life, and perhaps I an extension of his; and I’m grateful.
    Ãšlfur and Elín, during the rendezvous in Berlin, went to a bookstore—he had a talent for choosing books, said Elín and her mother long after at my kitchen table—and they picked out a book because its title seemed so relevant to their uncertain fate. It was one of mine. Then he went north for his bone marrow transplant and then home to Iceland. The operation did not work. He did not die immediately but they never saw each other again, because when he commenced to die she was too far away and he went too fast.
    She drank the book down in one long gulp and marked it up, though she was not a reader generally. Like a lot of visual artists, she mostly plunged into the difficult books through which you hack your way slowly. She gave the book the wolf chose to her mother, and her mother kept it for several months and then read it on the airplane to my city to which she had never been before, to see the opening of the exhibition of her friend Olafur Eliasson. Olafur too had read a book of mine and sought me out when he came to install his prisms and crystals and tunnels and lights and shades and images of Iceland in a museum in my city.
    That summer, while everything else was falling apart, the far north came calling. I had been commissioned to write about the north, had begun rereading
Frankenstein
and Barry Lopez’s
Arctic Dreams,
and then this Icelandic man showed up trailing images and aspects of his country. I went many times to look at his tall wall of fragrant, thick Icelandic moss that gradually faded from green to pale yellow, his mirrored rooms, his big grids of photographs of Iceland, of islands in one grid, of horizons in another, his chamber of models of smaller crystals and faceted constructions, rooms of lights and shadows, a dark room of mist with rainbows glinting in it, an elemental world, an Icelandic world that was also the world of poesis, of making.
    Olafur and Úlfur, Fríða and Elín, four people from a place I had never been to, a place I’d seen mostly in the pictures of a photographer I’d been commissioned to write about a dozen years earlier, whose images showed old sod houses melting back into a green landscape, threads of water streaming across black lava moss on stones, purity, and remoteness. Fríða landed in my town, went to her hotel, put on a black dress, and walked over to the opening reception for Olafur’s show.
    I came to it too, walked up and said hello to Olafur just as Fríða arrived, so he introduced us and we fell to talking as he was taken up by other obligations. She was my age and my height and not far from my coloring, though she was leaner and more glamorous, with cheekbones you could build castles on and magnificent poise. And so we met and I said it was a pity that she was just in town so briefly and offered to show her the city, prompted by some affinity or resemblance or maybe by her foreignness and by hospitality, since she was in my realm I knew and loved so well. It didn’t hurt that she’d just finished my book. I also had a minor notion that someday it might be good to know someone in Iceland well enough to look them up for coffee, and Olafur had treated me with a courtesy that was a balm in those bad days.
    I picked Fríða up the next morning and showed her facets of my city on the way