Art by Christiane Ritter, created when she spent a year in the Arctic with her husband in the 1930s. She later published A Woman in the Polar Night, detailing that time of her life.
In the holy stillness, everything is lit by a supernatural brightness. Two gulls fly low and silent close by the hut toward the fjord. They are lit up by the red rays of the bright sun. Their magnificent broad wings are a deep pink in the turquoise sky. Back in my bunk I cannot fall asleep again. I feel as though I have had a glimpse of another world.
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I myself stand forlornly by the water’s edge. The power of this worldwide peace takes hold of me, although my senses are unable to grasp it. And as though I were unsubstantial, no longer there, the infinite space penetrates through me and swells out, the surging of the sea passes through my being, and what was once a personal will dissolves like a small cloud against the inflexible cliffs. I am conscious of the immense solitude around me. There is nothing that is like me, no creature in whose aspect I might retain a consciousness of my own self; I feel that the limits of my being are being lost in this all- too- powerful nature, and for the first time I have a sense of the divine gift of companionship.
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Why have I been so shaken by the peacefulness of nature? Because it was preceded by the titanic storm? Do we really need the force of contrast to live intensively? It must be that. For a gentle song would not shake us if we had never heard a loud one. We human beings are only instruments over which the song of the world plays. We do not create ideas; we only carry them.
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To paint this landscape would require the devotion of the old masters. Perhaps this habit of devotion will one day be recaptured. Then the painters too will paint differently. Then the heavens will again become bright and transparent, and all the earth and everything born of the earth will again acquire their firm, clear- cut outline, and only that which has soul and life will carry the inner light.
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Whatever we feel, it is not loneliness as we stare into the distance. It is as though we are enclosed in a miraculous world.
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It is full moon. No central European can have any idea of what this means on the smooth frozen surface of the earth. It is as though we were dissolving in moonlight, as though the moonlight were eating us up. It makes no difference when we go back into the hut under the snow after a moonlight trip. The light seems to follow us everywhere. One’s entire consciousness is penetrated by the brightness; it is as though we were being drawn into the moon itself.
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The whole sky is deep lilac, lightening into a tender cobalt blue at the horizon, over the sea of ice. From the east a pale- yellow brightness spreads, and the frozen sea, reflecting the heavenly colours, shines like an immense opal. Where sea and land meet, and where the tidal water thrusts through to the surface around the heavy masses of ice, the colours of the sky are reflected as brightly as in a mirror.
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And suddenly I realise that civilisation is suffering from a severe vitamin deficiency because it cannot draw its strength directly from nature, eternally young and eternally true. Humanity has lost itself in the unnatural and in speculation. Only now do I grasp the real meaning and the world-transforming element in the saying: “Become as the peasants, understand the sacredness of the earth.”
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No, the Arctic does not yield its secret for the price of a ship’s ticket. You must live through the long night, the storms, and the destruction of human pride. You must have gazed on the deadness of all things to grasp their livingness. In the return of light, in the magic of the ice, in the life- rhythm of the animals observed in the wilderness, in the natural laws of all being, revealed here in their completeness, lies the secret of the Arctic and the overpowering beauty of its lands.
— Quotes from A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter
Source for images: Svalbard Museum