All animals grow timid in the winter night..

 

FOX / one of my artworks from a few years ago

 

The sleeping, shining-white fox fits in wonderfully

with the stillness of the night, which still remains

magically bright. Mikkl is like a fragment of the

mysterious Ice Age, lying hidden in the frozen, quiet

brightness. In the transparent heavens the large moon

looks quite near, not as it does in Europe where its

light is cold and distant. Here it seems to belong to

our world, the luminous picture of a sharply outlined

ice landscape.

Mikkl’s behaviour takes on a touch of timidity. All

animals grow timid in the winter night, the hunters say.

[…]

“Poor Mikkl, you’re traipsing to your doom. In a few

days the fox-trapping will begin; they’re after your life.

They will pull your beautiful fur over your head and

send you far away to a place where a lot of people live

close to each other. There they will give you glittering

eyes made of glass, and then you will hang in one of

the thousand glittering shops in one of the thousand

glittering streets, together with thousand of other

glittering dead things. Do you know, Mikkl, there’s

so much artificial glitter there that the people no

longer know anything about light, about its coming

and going, and about the magic of twilight.”

I fetch water from the lagoon; it is so clear that I can

see the rust-brown weeds at the bottom. Mikkl also

laps up some of the clear water but without letting me

out of his sight. Suddenly he raises his head and stares

at me as though it were the first time in his life he had

seen me. Horror glares out of his wide, glowing green

eyes; then he leaps aside and runs off without once

turning around. He runs across the black field of stone

and at last disappears, a tiny spot in my sight, at the

foot of the great black mountains.

 

Perhaps they become clairvoyant, the animals, as the

darkness grows, and then see the true face of men?

 

—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night [1938]

 

 

Sunday sketch / a book

 

 

"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