Good Morning, Midnight

“As the remaining light faded from the noon sky, he watched a polar bear lope across one of the mountain ridges, heading toward the sea to hunt. Augie wished he could climb into its thick skin and sew it shut behind him. He imagined what it would feel like […] No thoughts—just instincts. Just hunger and sleepiness. And desire, if it was the right time of the year, but never love, never guilt, never hope. An animal built for survival, not reflection.”

The polar bear becomes a symbol for Augie and his journey to deeper Human and Environmental Connection. In the early days of his isolation, he sees the bear as an idealized version of himself: a being who only survives, never needing to deal with feelings or reflection. This moment foreshadows Augie’s increased reflection and feeling during his last months at the observatory and at Lake Hazen.

“For the first time in years, she felt at peace with the sacrifices she had made to join the space program—the family she had left behind. The aching doubt of whether it had been worth it, whether she had made the right choices, fell away. She floated forward, unburdened, into the certainty that she was following the path she was meant to, that she was supposed to be here, that she was a tiny and intrinsic piece of a universe beyond her comprehension.”

Prior to the anxieties and regrets dredged up by Earth’s radio silence, Sully glimpses what life could be like if she accepted her calling and released the guilt with which she has lived for years. Once the darkness of a silent Earth sets in, Sully cannot retain this feeling and spends the rest of her time on the Aether attempting to reconcile her choices, her regrets, and her fears.

“They were adrift in silence. The magnitude of their experience, of the things they had learned and were continuing to uncover, demanded a wider audience. The crew of the Aether had undertaken the journey not just for themselves, but for the entire world. The ambition that had fueled them on Earth was nothing more than flimsy vanity out here in the blackness.”

Like Augie, Sully questions the meaning and value of her work without an audience to see and recognize it. Failing to appreciate the value of work or creation for its own sake, or as a method of connection to oneself, Sully seems to need societal validation, particularly given the societal judgement she faces for having “abandoned” her family.

“It felt good to be seen, but also a little painful, as if her skin were burning beneath his gaze.”

Unable as yet to recognize Harper’s feelings for her, Sully nonetheless feels their connection, identifying his ability to see through her armor. Having spent much of her life, particularly since the emotional and then physical loss of her mother, struggling to connect with others but craving it all the same, Sully is caught between fear and connection.

“But he hadn’t thought. He had identified a target before thinking anything at all. And he knew, with a sinking burn in his gut, that he would do it again. He told himself it was to protect Iris […] And perhaps that was true—wolves are not harmless creatures, after all—but there was something else. A primal taste, sour, like fear, rising in the back of his throat, or maybe loneliness.”

Having shot the wolf that Iris was carefully approaching, Augie feels regret and shame as he watches Iris cry over its body. Since Iris is a creation of his mind, Augie himself might have felt drawn to the wolf but suppressed the fleeting connection by shooting it. This instinct foreshadows the revelation that Augie regularly “experimented” with love, drawing women in and then destroying them emotionally to drive them away.

“She wished that she had brought more pictures, that she had had a whole thumb drive full of them—more than just the one, which was out of date even when they left. What kind of mother wouldn’t have brought at least a dozen, she thought.”

Sully’s relationship with her daughter and ex-husband frequently causes her regret. Her love for her daughter is intertwined with societal expectations of motherhood, leaving Sully with a haunting feeling of failure.

“In his dreams he was a still-young man just beginning to fall in love with himself. He was growing more and more certain that he could, should, have whatever he wanted. He was smart, and ambitious, and destined for greatness. […] He was in high demand. For a time.”

To contextualize the depth of Augie’s shame and the journey he undertakes toward connection, Brooks-Dalton reveals the heights of his success. The content of Augie’s fantasies and the hint that even the reality proved fleeting and unsatisfying (“For a time.”) illustrate the self-centered mask that Augie has used to cope with loneliness.

“He envied the bear its immensity, its simple needs and clear purpose, but across the vista a whiff of loneliness swirled, too, a feeling of longing and doom. He felt a piercing sadness for the bear, all alone on the mountain range—a creature consumed with the mechanics of sustenance […] An emotion stirred in his stomach and Augustine realized it was discontent—for the bear, but also for himself.”

During his second sighting of the polar bear, Augie’s perspective begins to shift. At first leaning toward his typical grandeur and envying the bear’s “immensity,” he quickly sees his own loneliness in the bear. For the first time, he recognizes the sadness of a life preoccupied with sustenance or, in Augie’s case, empty pursuits.

“In the early days with Iris at the observatory, he had idly wondered what would become of her when he died. But following the bear sighting, as the sun hung in the sky longer and longer, he began to consider it more carefully. Augie began to think beyond his own timeline and into hers. He wanted something different for her—connection, love, community. He didn’t want to go on making excuses for his inability to give her anything but the same emptiness he'd given himself.”

This moment is a key turning point for Augie that illustrates The Effects of Parenting on Identity. Beyond a change in perspective, he also develops a sense of responsibility and care and endeavors to change his behavior and help another person.

“In Canada, when her mother was married and pregnant and then consumed by the twins, Sully hauled the telescope outside by herself, onto the icy second-floor deck crowded by pin trees, their needled boughs swinging over the wooden platform and blocking her view of the horizon. The stars didn’t seem quite as clear without her mother beside her, but still the constellations comforted her.”

Sully’s backstory hints at both the beginnings of her emotional isolation and the seeds of her future motherly guilt. Feeling abandoned by her mother and tolerated by her stepfather, she retreated to the stars, which became her world and her coping mechanism. Having seen her mother sacrifice her brilliant mind and personality to motherhood, just as society demands, Sully instead chose her career but cannot escape the guilt of societal expectations.

“Taking her tiny hands in his, he felt the hot but not-too-hot flush of healthy circulation. He leaned back and looked her over, carefully this time. She smiled, an uncertain slant to her brow, as if she was worried about him—as if he were the one acting strange.”

This moment provides one of the first clues to Iris’s true nature. Seeing her sitting in the snow wearing only long underwear, Augie panics and runs to her; when he finds her safe from frostbite, he nearly questions his perception of reality. He quickly ignores this potential reality check despite the physical evidence, as his ongoing reckoning with Time, Memory, and Redemption requires Iris’s presence.

“She reflected on Devi’s words, wondering what it would feel like to love [Harper] back—wondering if she already did. Unsure, she tried to reject the possibility, and instead let the black glow of space fill her imagination with its emptiness.”

Sully again flirts with love and connection but retreats. Having been forced to acknowledge Harper’s feelings for her by Devi’s observation, she considers the possibilities but quickly returns to the stars to distance herself.

“He felt a small twinge of regret that he had never bothered to learn a single thing about this environment he’d spent the past few years living in—not on purpose, anyway. […] Augustine knew only about the distant stars, billions of miles away. He’d been moving from place to place his entire life and had never bothered to learn anything about the cultures or wildlife or geography that he encountered, the things right in front of him. They seemed passing, trivial. His gaze had always been far-flung.”

As Augie begins to open himself to Iris and to the landscape around him, he recognizes just how distant he has been from his own world. Never fully inhabiting his life, he lived in the stars, pushing away real connection and ignoring his surroundings. As he connects to himself, he begins to connect to the natural world as well.

“She knew she was ready […] but there was an emotion stirring that didn’t belong. Devi’s dream—it must be fear. A thick-rooted fear, growing in the part of her where reason didn’t live. Someone else might have called it intuition, but not Sully. She wrote it off as nerves and turned away from the window, back to the ship, back to the plan.”

This moment foreshadows Devi’s death. Sully distances herself from her emotions as usual, ignoring stirrings of intuition in favor of calming herself with logistics and reason.

“It wasn’t personal—it was never personal. He wanted to understand love’s boundaries, to see what sort of flora grew on the other side, what sort of fauna lived there. […] He wanted to understand these things clinically, to experiment with love’s limits, its flaws. He didn’t want to feel it, just to study it. It was recreational. Another field of study to explore.”

As Augie begins to feel real love for Iris, he reflects on his history with the concept. Just as he buried himself in science and experimentation at work, he also distanced himself from others by treating love and relationship as experiments. Caught in his own ego, he hurt others for the sake of the answers he wanted.

“She wondered if this feeling would ever lift, if she would ever be able to laugh with her whole body or exchange silly banter with Harper again, shuffling the deck into a waterfall as they had just a few nights ago. It didn’t seem possible.”

After Devi’s death, Sully falls into a deep depression, avoiding the crew and struggling to see past her despair. Her struggle with these feelings illustrates the difficulty of loss, exacerbated for her because she habitually distances herself from others.

“The equinox slipped past, and before Augie knew it the solstice was bearing down on them—the arrival of the midnight sun. He’d never been in the Arctic for a full polar day before; he had always fled south when the cargo planes began arriving on their biennial supply runs in the summer, when the stars disappeared from the sky for the season, leaving him with nothing to do and no reason to stay. As the weather warmed and the snow melted he began to realize how much he had missed.”

The midnight sun represents Augie’s growing awareness of and relationship with everything around him. No longer able to run away when the distraction of the night sky vanishes, Augie learns to enjoy the changes in his environment and to find new, small pleasures such as baking or fishing.

“The winter had laid him low […] but with the endless light in the sky he felt a kind of buoyancy, a charge of electricity running through his nerves.”

As Augie connects to the land and his own feelings, his personal journey and the change of seasons begin to reflect one another. In the winter he was laid low not only by physical ailments but also by the shame and grief brought on by his increased personal reflection. By summer, however, he has learned how to feel and how to connect with himself, other people, and nature, bringing a lightness to his heart as light takes over the landscape.

“Sully looked at her crewmates and it dawned on her that they were her family—that they had been all along.”

Sully has spent much of the journey feeling like she abandoned her child and struggling to connect with others. During the crew’s brief memorial for Devi, she finally recognizes the family that she and the crew have created—a family built of mutual understanding and respect—which alleviates her sense of failure and loneliness.

“He wanted to know how she’d decided to become an astronaut, what it was about the loneliness of space that had made her leave everything behind. He wanted to tell her about his work, his achievements, but also his failures—to confess his sins, and to be forgiven.”

As Augie finally makes contact with someone outside the Arctic (Sully), his newly discovered capacity for connection bubbles over, leaving him with a desire for longer conversations in which he can learn more about another person and share his own life. Beyond that, he wishes to admit his sins to someone, looking outside himself for the final piece of redemption.

“He struggled to understand what he had known all along. His head ached from it.”

This is the moment when Augie is about to realize who Iris really is. He recognizes that he imagined her, and he struggles to accept this, even attempting to ask her why she is there.

“Augustine turned away from the mirror and left behind that brief shimmer of honesty—too heavy to carry with him, too blinding to look at for very long […] Alone on her front step, he leaned back against her door and stared up at the overcast sky, dark and dense and impenetrable. No stars, just clouds. It was the last time they spoke.”

As Augustine nears his final days, he recalls his only moment of deep feeling and of attempted connection before his time with Iris. In this moment with Jean, he glimpsed the shame and grief he must face to connect more deeply with others. Unable to muster this honesty, he turned again to the stars, putting away the shame until he is ready to confront it in his final months of life.

“The bear groaned and rolled onto its side. Augie moved closer. He wasn’t afraid any longer, and as he fitted himself against the bear’s warm stomach and felt its massive arms close over him, he was at peace. No longer an interloper, but a part of the landscape. He felt the bear’s hot breath against the crown of his head and burrowed deeper against it, turning his face away from the wind and into the fur, where he found the quiet thunder of a heartbeat, slow and deep and steady as a drum.”

These are Augie’s final moments. Turning away from reaching out to Sully again, he goes to the bear dying by the lake and becomes one with nature, surrendering to the love and companionship he has learned to feel.