When you have shut your doors, and darkened your room, remember never to say you are alone, for you are not alone, but God is within, and your genius is within. Epictetus, _Discourses_ When people are in pain and most need others, many wall themselves in. This very human tendency is illustrated by a famous story. In 1934, Admiral Richard Byrd led an expedition to Antarctica, where he established a base on the edge of the Ross Ice Barrier, 700 miles north of the South Pole. Byrd then decided to set up a small weather observation post closer to the pole, which he chose to man alone. He would stay in a one-room cabin, a box {10} that measured nine feet by thirteen feet, lowered into a rectangular hole cut into the ice to protect the cabin from gale-force winds during the coming winter months. Byrd was committing himself to a degree of personal isolation few men have ever taken on. What happened to him in the months ahead reveals something important to psychologists that all of us should bear in mind. Byrd's men left him in his tiny station and returned across the ice to the main base 123 miles to the north. Winter blizzard conditions soon surrounded Byrd. He knew he was in for a long period of solitary confinement, with no hope of returning to the base, even if a medical emergency demanded this. He could never make the return trip to the base on his own, and it would be too dangerous for a team of men to try to get to him in the winter darkness across the miles of ice. After several months of isolation, Byrd became very ill. He was distressed and confused about his condition--nausea, vomiting, terrible headaches, blurred vision, great weakness. Days would go by, and he would cling to life by a thread, his mind wandering, drifting in and out of the dizzying incoherence of frequent comas. He would, by sheer force of will, gather his reserve of fading energy and stagger across the tiny room to light the stove and open a can of food, which he soon lost from his stomach. Gradually, he came to realize that the fumes from his kerosene stove and from the gasoline-powered generator for the telegraph were poisoning him. But if he turned off the stove, he would freeze to death, and the telegraph was his only contact with others. He knew his life was in real danger, yet he refused to let his men know of his desperate situation. Nor could he _admit_ to _himself_ that he was in trouble. Listen to his own words, written half a century ago, in his snow-buried room with the air heavy with fumes and the inside walls encrusted with glistening ice: It is painful for me to dwell on the details of my collapse.... The subject is one that does not easily bear discussion, if only because a man's hurt, like his love, is most seemly when concealed. From my youth I have believed that sickness was somehow humiliating, something to be kept hidden....