Conversations with ourselves in metaphysical experiences of nature

This chapter discusses the issues raised in Byatt’s story. Byatt’s story Stone Woman evokes the transformative power of grief. The chapter explains how death and grief, the stories they tell and the sacrifices they memorialise are located in the landscape in the form of monuments, official or personal. The problem that structural approaches face is to explain how these broader and long-term changes, these larger forces, shape the daily and direct experience of and in landscapes and environments. Thus structural approaches have proved fruitful in explaining how political, social, cultural and economic forces shape landscapes and environment. The chapter describes the already well established that a conversation with landscape is a fundamental feature of the constitution of the nation-form in Iceland, in the formation of Icelandic identities. While road safety and traffic accidents have been a concern in Iceland for some time, autumn of 2006 and onwards saw the outbreak of unprecedented panic.