Sunday sketch / a book

 

 

"How many days it takes is difficult to say. For herethere are no days because there are no nights. One daymelts into the next, and you cannot say this is the endof today and now it is tomorrow and that was yesterday.It is always light, the sea is always murmuring, and themist 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 nothingbut 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 growinglighter and lighter, more bleak and more lonely. The nightsdo not darken. Bare and craggy mountaintops jut out the lividlight of the water. A strange cool wind blows to me out of thisprimeval landscape. It might be the world in the last days ofthe Flood." 
"When she tries to take a photograph, Ritter says,"It seems to me a deadly sin to steal a piece of thissupernatural scene and carry it away with me."[...]"A year in the Arctic should be compulsory toeveryone", she would say regularly later in life."Then you will come to realize what's importantin life and what isn't." —Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night1938 / Foreward by Sara Wheeler