Far away to the north, this is the nightless season. Since winter, the days have been growing longer and now, above 66 degrees, 33 minutes North latitude, evenings and mornings have bridged the gap of darkness altogether. The sun circles round and round in the sky. At midnight, on an Arctic shore, the sun lies due north.

It's neither magical nor invigorating, though the mosquitoes love it. Light all day, all the time, is by turns fascinating, exhausting, troubling. Unusual, yes, but something seems out of kilter - it's the Earth itself, in fact. Where's the cycle, the variation? When do you lie down? Where do you find the deep withdrawal that comes with night?

The Land of the Midnight Sun - it's an accurate but terribly misleading phrase. It trips off the tongue too easily. It sounds like a holiday. It sounds wonderful.

In the inhabited parts of the Far North - that is, not at the North Pole itself but around the Arctic edges hundreds of miles to the south - it's not an all-day noon. Somewhere around 10 p.m. or so the sun settles down toward the horizon as if it were getting ready for dusk, and a sort of pre-twilight glow fetches in under the stunted pines and birches - it's recognizably evening - but then the sun just keeps rolling along in the gentlest of arcs that never quite brings it out of the sky. At about 5 a.m. it hikes up again into the morning.

It's that gauzy time between that's so disconcerting. It's a transitional moment that can't complete the transit. Those of us from farther south expect the evening light of summer to grow gold and then rosy, to fade, to wash out, to linger even as it dies away. It's the going from something to nothing; that's what we know. It's the reward for another day. In the north it doesn't happen. Light and time get stuck.

Dreamy and unsettled, you doze and wake, you long for darkness and chide yourself for doing so. For is this not an astonishing moment?

What if you couldn't report to those back home what the shining sun looks like at 1 a.m.? At 2 a.m.? At 3 a.m.? It's an unfounded fear. You can't escape it.

Guilt, of all things, creeps into the back of your mind. You should be bursting with energy. You should be reveling in it. How can sunlight make you so out of sorts, so distracted? Just a little touch of night would mean so much.

Yesterday (June 21) was the summer solstice. Even today the sun dips a little lower. The summer is contracting. Sometime in the next few weeks, depending on latitude, there'll be a sundown. It will be dusk without darkness at first, but by late July or August, night will be reasserting itself.

The sun must hurry now to keep an appointment, because by Sept. 23 it will have only 12 hours in the sky - in the north and at the equator and all over the world. That's 12 hours of daylight that the Arctic has to give up in the next three months - or about 8 minutes every day. This is a part of the world where you can feel the rush toward winter, which is another way of saying that, day by day, you can feel the progress of the Earth in its orbit around the sun.

All the summer daylight is paid back in December; by that time, endless night holds no comforts. There's the rhythm: by year and not by day. The Far North doesn't work according to the rules that formed us. We fit ourselves uneasily into its pattern. And for those there now, this is the burdensome season of light.