Long’s book is not religious, but it is filled with wonder. The mechanistic science that’s often fed to the public is frequently technical and lacks those mysteries we’ve evolved to love. Nowhere in this book is the compelling aspect more relevant than in Long’s accounts of Christmas. The population of Antarctica—a select group by anyone’s standards—is mostly scientists and technicians. Deep field expeditions, it stands to reason, take place in December, which is the summer of Antarctica. In the case of those in the field, they are far removed from their home base, and even the earliest explorers noted in their diaries that Christmas was celebrated, in however minuscule a manner rations and perilous conditions allow. Nobody bulking here that it’s all just a myth.
Lovecraft’s story places explorers far from help in the mountains of Antarctica where they discover they’re not alone. The story inspired such movies as The Thing from Another World, and therefore John Carpenter’s The Thing. Lovecraft, like Long, was a disciple of science and yet, even in his atheistic world deities break in. It’s like Lewis’s Narnia where endless winter with no Christmas is unbearable. Long makes it clear in his account that Antarctica changes a person. Transcendence, those of us who linger over religions know, can express itself in many different ways. For some it is the grandeur of barrenness and inhospitable weather of an unfeeling environment where both macro and micro-predators have trouble surviving and penguins gather to struggle through weather humans can barely tolerate. For others it is camping below the very mountains of madness. Without some wonder, we just don’t survive.