We are taught from birth to fear the dark and crave the light. We treat enlightenment as the goal and obscurity as the enemy. But after six months at the South Pole, living through a night that lasts half a year, I realized we have the metaphor backwards. Light doesn’t just show us the world; it also hides us from ourselves.

I thought my first days at the South Pole would be monumental. I had imagined stepping onto the ice with some sense of arrival, of accomplishment, of having crossed into something profound. I expected something meaningful, something that felt commensurate with the extremity of where I had just landed.

When I first began working on this book, I tried dozens of titles. Some were too dramatic, while others were too literal. Some tried too hard to sound literary. But there was one title I kept coming back to, one I thought would work from the beginning: Endurance: The Spirit of Survival at the South Pole.