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I look through a ledger to find Viktor, and there is an official red stamp across his first name. It reads 'Israel'. An edict decreed that all Jews had to take new names. Someone has gone through every single name in the lists of Viennese Jews and stamped them: Israel' for the men, 'Sara' for the women.
I am wrong. The family is not erased, but written over. And, finally, it is this that makes me cry.

Some of these crates are taken to the National Library. Here the books are picked over by librarians and scholars and then they are dis-persed. As with the art historians, these are busy days for librarians and scholars. Some of these books are to stay in Vienna, some end up in Berlin. Others are destined for the Führerbibliothek planned for Linz, still others for Hitler's private library.

You think people will wait until you're ready. You think they will act according to your time. But they do things their own way.
Life does things its own way. It is too late.

This book is like a movie, you can feel the air changing when people appear or leave, not like the color change of the leaf, but like the silence of the sudden wind, they took something with you. Then you finally find out who is actually in your heart but who just left some hurt and heat in your soul.

'He asked me to destroy it and I said I would, but I never did.
It's yours now, Goose. As his dealer, I'm giving it back to you.
Whatever you choose to do, I won't ask questions. No one will'

He went up to the room Iris had been sleeping in. She'd stripped the bed and emptied the cupboards, leaving the doors and drawers wide open, so that the place looked ransacked. 'Oh, Iris, he said. 'Oh, Iris. Then he went to Netta's room, followed by Susan's.

To begin with, Susan had worried that working for Vic might be a bad idea, but Netta argued that at least Goose was safe at the studio. And, actually, he found that helping his father with his work, while avoiding art himself, had been a way of keeping close to it and simultaneously hiding. Like weaning himself off without going cold turkey.

Love at a rupture

We went bang right from the start. You could have blindfolded us and we would still have found each other. It's a miracle, when you think about it. How on earth, on this vast planet of eight billion human beings, do two people who are destined for each other manage to meet?'

‘Love wasn't the sweeping-you-sideways feeling you saw in films. It was more like getting on the slow train and arriving with lots of stations in between.’

“For an isolated moment, a breeze swept through the room.
Papers lifted from the floor, the shutters swayed. The lake gave a shimmer, then went still again. Beneath that sewn-up surface, something was alive and present.” So beautiful, like the soul from the nature are whispering something human being cannot catch

He stood beside the camellia tree and lit a cigarette as he gazed up. From her hiding place, Netta kept looking down. The watcher being watched. She thought of everything he'd said.

Ronan's name is known, but the names of those buried under the turf are lost, save for one tantalising detail, which Martin provides: the Rona people, he says
'took their surname from the colour of the sky, rainbow and clouds'.

'He thought he was doing them a favour, but these new houses had windows. If the glass broke, well, where do you get window glass, here? They needed paint... timber... but how d'you get timber where there's no trees...?

The ice at bottom of the core is 20,000 years old. They were bringing the deep past out of its silence, waking it up to ask it about change. There are people who crawl about on glaciers, measuring speeds and surges, and the calving of icebergs. Together they bring worrisome news from the farthest remotes. I sail on the surface of understanding, a flicker here, a silence there.

The northern lights may or may not make sound, but I believe they kept us awake. All that energy. In the morning, over breakfast, some people agree, but others scoff at this idea: they are eighty miles up - how can they keep you awake? They are just charged particles, trapped in the earth's magnetic field. True, but aren't we all?

Polly comes up beside me and pokes me as best she can through all the layers of clothes. With head tilted back she whispers, 'They are changing without moving, which is true, and I fall to wondering if there are other ways of changing without moving. Growing older perhaps, as we are. Reforming one's attitudes, maybe.

The old sagas say that the Viking settlers of Iceland took ravens. Out of sight of land, wallowing at sea, they would release a raven and watch it climb the air until it was high enough to sight land. Where the raven headed, they followed in their open boats. Maybe ravens had brought them here, too, in their Greenlandic voyages, a thousand years ago. A thousand years. The blink of an eye.

When first I left Orkney, my friend Sean gave me a compass.
I used to wear it round my neck at parties, and when people asked about it, I would tell them it was so I could find my way home. Wherever I was, north was always home. I left the compass somewhere one night. Then I was totally lost.

An adventurous family coming to stay for just a couple of years before they move on should not be seen as a failure but, rather, a healthy part of the flow of people bringing new ways and keeping the place working. People here ate often called by their house name rather than surname. The houses are familiar, in collective memory, and will outlive the people staying in them.

第三行

The Blue Lagoon is not a natural phenomenon, but a pool created by the run-off of a geothermal plant.
Drilling started in the Svartsengi ('black meadow) lava field in 1976, drawing up steam which is used to generate electricity, and hot water which emerges at over 200°C, packed with minerals and algae.

Plants and animals don't fight the winter; they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer.
They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through.
Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight.