I soon found myself at the museum, paying the price of admission and proceeding into a dark exhibition room. I watched as a camera panned across a summer landscape of lichen. I became aware of a figure sitting next to me, a woman, who was looking on in disgust at the recording. She did not, she said, know what was worse. Night growing to cover everything up, or the day. She had come, she said, to witness the midnight sun. Since childhood she had wanted nothing more than to watch the sun stay in the sky. She had wanted to walk through a town whose night streets were absolutely deserted, under a low sun. How it had played on her imagination all these many years! A daylit city whose businesses were shuttered, whose boulevards and back alleys were empty, a city where not a single voice could be heard, nothing except for the wind and her own breathing. And so, at long last, she had travelled north, on a whim as it were, she had been fed up with her life back in England, fed up with her job as head of cardiology at a reasonably sized hospital, fed up with her lifelong crook of a husband, and had arrived in the land of the midnight sun. And yet she found herself waking up in the bright middle of the night with a feeling of dread, not to say panic, unaccountable since she had nothing to do, she was perfectly entitled to a holiday, to wander the city at any hour, she was accountable to no one. Something, she said, was not sitting well. No matter where she went, the sun was always around the corner. If she went down to listen to the river, there again was the sun, peeking out from behind the birches. She had come to think it was unnatural, almost obscene. She despaired. She rented a car and drove herself even further north, desiring to cross the line – symbolic but also in fact painted on the tarmac – into the Arctic Circle. Still she felt the same emptiness, as though a wind were blowing inside of her and finding only bare branches to press up against. What a failure of vision her life had become, she said and sighed. She began digging through her handbag. I watched as she pulled out a stick of chewing gum, unwrapped it and folded it into her mouth. And me, she wanted to know, was I here for the conference. Wherever she went, north or south, the entire country seemed to be holding conferences or symposia of various kinds. It often seemed to her as though she were the only person in all of Finland not currently taking part in one of these meetings. If she went to eat dinner in a restaurant, say, half the place would be booked up by one of these groups, who orderedbottle after bottle of wine, argued loudly over matters of semantic indifference and inevitably made a fuss over the bill. Everywhere she went, it seemed, she was followed by hordes of professionals with name badges affixed to their lapels or lanyards strung around their necks. As a result, she had seen many of the same people in different places in the country and had befriended a number of them. What else could she do? It was like the Americans said, you could either beat them or you could join them. Even in the most unlikely of places, namely the city science museum, there seemed to be an event of some kind under way. One could not make it up. One of her new acquaintances had spotted her in the building’s atrium and invited her to the reception, which was just beginning in the hall, would I join her? The two of us stood up and walked into a long white room, which looked through tall windows out onto the water.