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 didn't plan to write a book about Antarctica. The story found me years after I left the bottom of the world, a place where silence has more to say than noise ever could.