Admiral Richard Byrd preferred to carry out his winter-long weather observations in Antarctica by himself, in perilous conditions and twenty-four-hour darkness, rather than face, as he put it in Alone, the moment when “one has nothing left to reveal to the other, when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool, and the way he blows out a pressure lamp or drops his boots on the floor or eats his food becomes a rasping annoyance.”
Irrational antagonism
