The town under snow at night is by turns appealing and bleak. It looks like a model. Shake it and watch the snow fall. A lone kid is tobogganing by streetlight and the sky has turned a luminous blue. I think if I stretched out my hand it would come back stained. Horn intends to set up a writers’ residency here, and plans that the building might be used in other ways—for women’s chess (a game both immensely popular here and segregated), readings, music, meetings about environmental issues. How the building gets used will ultimately depend on the people who live in Stykkishólmur.

Inlaid in the rubber-tiled floor, whose color is flat, unobtrusive, and somehow just right—somewhere between the lichen that colonizes the rocks and the goose shit that spatters it—are words, written in a soft round-hand script reminiscent of primary school wall charts and reading primers, but here the letters have been snipped out of rubber. Calm, says the floor, breezy, it states, casually. The words are scattered like fallen leaves. Bad, threatening, clammy. Words in English and Icelandic, words I don’t understand. These are weather reports of the emotions. You are the weather, Horn’s work announces. We report the weather and the weather reports us. The words tell me that I am the weather here, sometimes clammy, frequently cold, occasionally stormy, bad now and then.

Whatever the weather says about the state of the world, it says as much about us. Several of Horn’s works are titled You Are the Weather: it’s what she calls her annotated floors and it’s the name of the well-known series of photographs of the face of a young Icelandic woman, just emerged from a pool and beaded with water. She looks at us, we look at her. Each time we look, something changes. Horn’s new book, Weather Reports You, and her ongoing Web site project provide a compilation of individual encounters and reminiscences of weather in Iceland.

This last work presents the experiences of Icelanders, many of whom come from the same region as Árni Thorlacius, who in 1845 began to compile the island’s first weather reports, here in Stykkishólmur. One of Thorlacius’s successors, Jóhann Pétursson, who worked for many years as a lighthouse keeper at Hornbjarg, told me that he had to record the weather at three-hour intervals round the clock for 25 years. It sounds like a lifetime punching the clock. “I had to go up onto the mountain every single day, whatever the weather,” he said. Sometimes he feels that his whole life had been spent more or less in peril. There is the Dutch nun, living in an Icelandic convent, who can’t drag herself away from the contemplation of the northern lights. Someone else remembers the day the fox farm blew away, and another how the weather affects his dreams, and how it matters whether the tide is ebbing or flowing, and whether the moon is waxing or waning. I imagine this man abed, dreaming, sensitive as a compass.

Another man from Stykkishólmur describes the terrifying weather on one particularly memorable day as “all over the place, like a madman’s piss.” This is apt. The next morning the wind plucked the door from my grasp then slammed it in my face when Roni called for me. This is a joke, I thought, as I wrestled my way into her big four-wheel drive. We tried heading over the mountainous ridge that divides the peninsula from the village of Bodir, from where we might visit the glacier on Snæfellsjökull. It proved just as much an apparition as when I first arrived. About a mile out of Stykkishólmur the weather hit us, the wind ramming the car first on one side, then the other, like a boxer softening up an opponent before going for the kill. I’m sure I saw a raven hurled backward through the blurred interference of the whiteout. The air was filled with flying shards of ice and snow scoured from the rocks, all driven horizontally across a field of vision that was little more than an annihilated smear. An emergency vehicle crawled slowly past, into nothingness, its feeble taillights winking as it disappeared. We turned around. The weather had finally reported us.