"How many days it takes is difficult to say. For here
there are no days because there are no nights. One day
melts into the next, and you cannot say this is the end
of today and now it is tomorrow and that was yesterday.
It is always light, the sea is always murmuring, and the
mist stands immovable as a wall around the hut.[…]
The way to the lagoon is like a journey into the incorporeal.
Mist above us and around us, and under our feet nothing
but stones. Large, broken, sharp-edged stones."
—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night
"We
make our way along the famously beautiful coast,
until one day we
notice that northward the world is growing
lighter and lighter, more
bleak and more lonely. The nights
do not darken. Bare and craggy
mountaintops jut out the livid
light of the water. A strange cool wind
blows to me out of this
primeval landscape. It might be the world in the
last days of
the Flood."
"When she tries to take a photograph, Ritter says,
"It seems to me a deadly sin to steal a piece of this
supernatural scene and carry it away with me."
[...]"A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to
everyone", she would say regularly later in life.
"Then you will come to realize what's important
in life and what isn't."
—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night
1938 / Foreward by Sara Wheeler
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