December 9, 2021
Last Saturday, beginning at 8:21 p.m., I watched the moon move over the sun: my first solar eclipse. This was the event I’ve most looked forward to this season, partly because its new to me and partly because the sun and moon are big personalities in the polar world. Antarctica’s surface, the “icescape”—glaciers, sea ice, snow, and volcanic rocks and dirt—is a quiet introvert. But the sky—wind, clouds, sun, and moon—is a commanding extrovert. If the wind is a sculptor, the light is a painter. Everything above and below the horizon is like a palette on an easel, a nearly blank slate. The interplay of lightness and darkness, the brushstrokes, dominates everything.
As you probably know by now, the sun has been above the horizon since October and will not set until February. We live in one very long day. This may sound strange, but one of the things I miss the most about the green world when I’m on the Ice is darkness. Natural, deep, thick, encompassing, velvety darkness. Artificially manufactured darkness—tucking in my dorm room’s window with ragged towels and sealing its cracks with duct tape to—is not enough, not the same as walking outside at night. I hoped that the eclipse would offer us a shadow, a fleeting semblance of normality. A dimming—for a moment—of the sun’s searing brightness. I wanted to not have to wear sunglasses at 9:00 p.m.
The unending sunniness here is usually one of my major rebuttals when someone says something to the effect: “I could never live in Antarctica.” I retort that it hardly snows here and it’s almost always sunny from October to February, far different from most northern places this time of year. It’s true. But what’s also true is that we need darkness as much as we need light.
Community preparations for the eclipse started weeks ago. An atmospheric scientist gave a public lecture. An information bulletin—containing printouts about the trajectory, mythology, and frequently asked questions about eclipses—was posted in the busiest hallway. Permission was granted for people to gather on the sea ice, which is quickly deteriorating, but safe enough. Volunteers taught people how to make pinhole cameras out of cardboard from recycling bins. I did little to “prepare.” I wanted a raw experience. I put on my warmest clothes, prodded my boyfriend to join me.
When we exited our dorm, people were already standing outside. One immediately offered me a glimpse through her cheap eclipse glasses: the moon inched in front of the sun. Most people huddled on the sea ice; from far away they looked like giant penguins standing in clumps. I convinced Nathan to walk to Hut Point, a peninsula that juts into the sea, despite the wind. Only a few people were there and we took shelter by Discovery Hut. A Canadian pilot from Saskatchewan kept offering us a glimpse of celestial bodies meeting through two pairs of broken polarized sunglasses and one layer of welding glasses. The view was kaleidoscopic, but I was grateful for it. I sipped tepid tea to stay warm; others smoked cigarettes. We debated whether the eclipse made the air colder. An authentic welding helmet was also passed around our group. Nathan, who describes himself as “not an eclipse person,” went home for hot tea.
I walked to the edge of the cliff to watch—to feel—the eclipse, to see if a shadow would rush towards us as I’ve read about in one of my favorite Annie Dillard essays, in which she writes gorgeously about the otherworldliness of an eclipse. On the cliff, I could hear, but not see, a Weddell seal wheezing nearby. Besides the heavy breathing and the wind, all stayed the same. The eclipse was only 80%, not full. I craved a bit of night, to see darkness drape itself across the sky. But darkness didn’t come. I walked home in the brightness, disappointed.
Wherever you are—if you are graced with natural darkness—cherish it.
Antarctica is a desert, the world’s largest. In the past few months, as I’ve prepared to return, I’ve sought out desert literature, everything from Paco Cantu’s The Line Becomes a River and Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends to Thomas Merton’s The Wisdom of the Desert.
From Merton’s book:
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.”
I was certainly drawn here for its sparseness, its spareness, and I’m curious what draws other people— what drew people hundreds of years ago—to seemingly bare places.
Of course, some peoples and cultures have thrived in deserts, polar deserts too, for thousands of years. Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland is giving me a tiny and beautiful glimpse into the world of indigenous polar people. An example: northern people saw themselves so intertwined with the natural world around them that the word for “weather” in Greenlandic (an almost universally understood language the polar north) is the same as the word for “consciousness.” I can relate to what Ehrlich wrote about missing darkness: "Night, unattainable now, seemed like an opulence, a dusky diamond."
I’ve also been reading a little about the monastic “desert mothers and fathers” of the third and fourth centuries, early Christians who abandoned life in cities to live as hermits and ascetics in monasteries—clusters of their single-celled dwellings—in African deserts. They went to the desert to strip away excess, the unnecessary, from their lives, to find divinity, both in the place and dwelling within.
Some of my favorite sayings of the desert mothers and fathers, the “ammas and abbas”:
“A Brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him for a word. The old man said to him, ‘Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.’”
“Abba Moses asked Abba Silvanus, ‘Can a man lay a new foundation every day? The old man said, ‘If he works hard, he can lay a new foundation every moment.’”
“There is grief that is useful, and grief that is destructive.”
“Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart.”
One story: St. Mary of Egypt, an amma, was a harlot-turned-repentant. She lived in a cave near a dried upstream. Her only clothing: her hair. She lived in a cave and “subsisted on little.” Father Zossima found her by the light of the moon. When she died, he buried her with the help of a lion.
Scetis was the home to a desert monastery, akin to a “research station” investigating the workings of their spirits, in present-day Wadi El Natrun in northern Egypt. In my online investigations of Scetis, I read that the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote the famous book The Little Prince, crashed an airplane in the desert near Scetis in 1935, intending to fly from Paris to Saigon. Afterward, he wrote the book Wind, Sand, and Stars. I checked it out of McMurdo’s library. I expected—perhaps naively—that the book would detail his encounter with monks and nuns. Instead, his accounts are filled with agonizing descriptions of dehydration, delusions, hallucinations, suffering, and preparations for death. Not what I was looking for while in my own desert of choice. He wrote (no typos):
“I swear to you that something is about it happen. I swear that life has sprung in this desert. I swear that life has sprung in this desert. I swear that this emptiness, this stillness, has suddenly become more stirring than a tumult on a public square.”
He found footprints of a Bedouin, the imprint of a resting camel. He was rescued, of course—but barely.
Just over a week ago, a plane arrived from New Zealand and we went from code green, living normally, to code yellow: mandatory masking and social distancing, incredibly hard to do well at a research station. And I, as a supervisor, must do my best to motivate people to follow the expectations. Code yellow was only supposed to last a week and then we were to return to normal until the end of January. Now, due to logistical foibles, old airplanes, weather, and people turning down vaccines and getting sent home, we will need to wear masks for all but three days in December at best, including Christmas.
As you can imagine, this is a massive blow to morale. My choices have been to be outside, try to sit in public spaces within occupancy limits, or sit in my room—my cell. Happily, we have moved today from code yellow to code blue, thanks to New Zealand being in a relatively healthy place COVID-wise. We must wear masks, but we can be within six feet of each other—a small but meaningful luxury.
What rivets me the most about the desert monastics, what feels most resonant about the experience of living in Antarctica over and over, is their ideas about accidie (or the condition “acedia”)—the “noonday demon”—associated with the high, searing midday sun of the desert.
For ascetic desert nuns and monks, the personification of high noon—a demon—incited struggle with “restlessness, excitability, and inattention to one's duties...exhaustion, listlessness, sadness, or dejection, restlessness, aversion to the cell and ascetic life, and yearning for family and former life.” Accidie incites “existential restlessness or anguish” in the face of a present with no distractions, few places to hide.
In his book The Three Marriages, the poet David Whyte describes accidie as “concentrated bitterness,” “a crucial and difficult threshold, where everything seems to recede like a tide,” and “a quickening, an acceleration of difficulties that occurs when we start to become serious about self-knowledge. The fragile surface self begins to fragment and slough off like an outer skin.” Whyte suggests that “stalking the darkness might be a good description of what occurs when we look beneath the surface.”
The noonday demon incites terror, the urge to return to safety and comfort. With accidie—and life in an isolated desert—the normal exit routes are cut off. Running away is not always an option. I can’t easily leave here, but there are plenty of ways to retreat, to distract myself if I wanted to.
But accidie—symbolized by the perpetual sun—can be a portal if we let it be.
One way out is through. “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
I’m trying to embrace this experience for what it is.
In eleven days, the sun will reach its zenith—the summer solstice—and slowly begin its descent, its elliptical two-month-long tilted swirl towards the horizon. In February, the light near the mountains will grow honeyed and pink—the first hints of darkness.
I know I will live, rest in darkness once again. I highly doubt, after this summer, that I will ever see another one of Antarctica’s long fiery summer day. I’m trying to treasure it.
“Abba Joseph came to Abba Lot and said to him: “Father, according to my strength I keep a moderate rule of prayer and fasting, quiet and meditation, and as far as I can I control my imagination; what more must I do?” And the old man rose and held his hands towards the sky so that his fingers became like flames of fire and he said: “If you will, you shall become all flame.”’
Thanks for reading,
Steph