A passage from Bill Green’s terrific book, Water Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes:

“We live our lives between barren plains of darkness,” Nabokov said. The light is as thin as a laser beam. We pass through it so quickly. And yet in its midst there is the illusion of endlessness. “This cannot end,” we say. And the beam, such a fine cut and sliver, opens so perfectly into enternity as we walk that we are lifted by it; for an instant it feels as though we are immortal. I felt that here. Somehow the light would be an expanse so great that the darkness before me was invisible.