The Noonday Demon

by Andrew Solomon

Inuit families are large. For months on end, families of perhaps twelve people stay unremittingly inside in their house, usually gathered in one room. It is simply too cold and too dark for anyone to go out except the father, who goes hunting or ice fishing once or twice a month to supplement the stock of dried fish from the summer. There are no trees in Greenland, so no jolly fires are burning inside; traditionally, in fact, there would have been only a small lamp burning seal fat inside an igloo where, as one Greenlander I met put it, “we all sat around together for months on end watching the walls melt.” In these circumstances of enforced intimacy, there is no place for complaining or for talking about problems or for anger and accusations. The Inuit simply have a taboo against complaining. They are silent and brooding or they are storytellers given to laughter, or they talk about the conditions outside and the hunt, but they almost never speak of themselves. Depressiveness, with concomitant hysteria and paranoia, is the price paid for the intense communality of Inuit lives.