The Aurora and the Fear
Where beauty is vast enough to loosen the mind that discipline bound
When the sun finally left us, it did not set so much as surrender the sky altogether.
The long polar night began, and with it came a darkness I had never properly imagined.
It was not the darkness of a room, but the darkness of a world that had forgotten light.
And yet into that blackness the came, night after night, like a fever of the heavens.
Curtains of green and violet fell and rose, folding upon themselves, silent, enormous, and utterly indifferent to us.
I have no words adequate to it, and I distrust the words I have, for they make it smaller.
The men would stand on the ice, faces upturned, forgetting the cold that was slowly killing us.
Beauty of that , I came to feel, is not comforting; it is a kind of terror.
It showed us how vast the of the world could be, and how small our courage against it.
One night Harding said, without turning his head, that the light looked like something trying to speak.
I understood him, though I would not have dared to phrase it so, even in my private journal.
There was a in that sky that made our expedition, our flags, our ambitions, seem like children's games.
The , I remembered from some half-forgotten book, is beauty mixed with the nearness of our own destruction.
If that is true, then we lived for months at the very center of the .
The asked nothing of us and promised nothing, and this was the source of its .
Some of the men grew silent and strange under it, as though the light had entered them.
Others wept, and were not ashamed, and I did not pretend that I had not seen them weep.
I feared the darkness for practical reasons, for the accidents and the sickness it concealed.
But I feared the beauty more, because it loosened something in the mind that discipline had bound tight.
A man who has stared long enough into that sky begins to doubt the importance of surviving at all.
So I rationed our looking, as I rationed our food, and called the men in after an hour.
"Enough," I would say gently, and they would come, , back to the small warm circle of the ship.
I wrote that the displays were "of scientific interest," which was true and was also a small .
The truth was that the sky frightened me more than the ice that was crushing our hull.
The ice, at least, was an enemy I could understand, measure, and plan against.
The was not an enemy at all, and that was precisely what made it unbearable.
When at last a pale band returned to the northern horizon, the men cheered as if for a rescue.
The sun was coming back, and with it the ordinary daylight fears that a man can actually fight.