“His work ethic was strong, his ego engorged, his results groundbreaking, but he wasn’t satisfied. He had never been satisfied and never would be. It wasn’t success he craved, or even fame, it was history: he wanted to crack the universe open like a ripe watermelon, to arrange the mess of pulpy seeds before his dumbfounded colleagues. He wanted to take the dripping red fruit in his hands and quantify the guts of infinity, to look back into the dawn of time and glimpse the very beginning. He wanted to be remembered.”

With the metaphor of the universe as a watermelon to be broken open and examined, Lily Brooks-Dalton sets up Augie’s primary motivation and one of the fatal flaws against which he must struggle during his isolation. Obsession with experimentation and flight from feelings have defined Augie’s life, leaving him to fill an inner emptiness with ego and the pursuit of knowledge. Now lacking an audience with which to share his findings, he begins to question the value of his life’s work.

“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.