The extreme isolation and hardness of the landscape is what drew me here, too. I took the trip with my partner Noah. Both of our marriages had recently ended, and in our 40s, we were suddenly rootless, dislocated in a way neither of us had expected. It was as though we’d sat on the shoreline, watching a glacier crumble into the ocean. We’d found each other, but our relationship was still new and untested. Perhaps we’d been drawn to the Arctic to see if anything permanent in the world still existed.

And so, at the end of December, after spending a few days in Oslo exploring Grünerløkka’s record shops and the Viking Museum’s ships, we took a direct morning flight to Svalbard. I imagined stepping off the plane into a sea of phosphorescent green aurora, but when we arrived, the sky was cloudy. Noah had seen the Northern lights many times, mostly in Iceland, but this would be my first experience. I loved the idea of the sun setting off a solar flare 92 million miles away, and having it appear here in all its eerie ectoplasmic beauty, like some ghostly atomic postcard.

A set of stairs was rolled up to the plane’s exit door and along with everyone else we wrapped our bodies in our serious coats and hats and mittens before stepping out into the icy air. At the bottom of the slippery staircase, a woman in a reflective flightsuit directed us toward the airport with hand-held lantern flares. A silver foil tiara spelled out Happy New Year on top of her white-blond bun. It was 10 in the morning on New Year’s Eve and pitch black.