And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
Emperor penguin chicks jump off a 50-foot cliff in Antarctica
National Geographic and BAFTA Award-winning cinematographer Bertie Gregory release unprecedented footage of Emperor penguin chicks leaping 50 feet off an Antarctic cliff. The never-before-filmed behavior was for the 2025 installment of National Geographic’s Emmy award-winning SECRETS OF franchise, SECRETS OF THE PENGUINS, premiering Earth Day 2025 on Nat Geo.
At the end of each Antarctic summer, the emperor penguins of the South Pole journey to their traditional breeding grounds in a fascinating mating ritual that is captured in this documentary by intrepid filmmaker Luc Jacquet. The journey across frozen tundra proves to be the simplest part of the ritual, as after the egg is hatched, the female must delicately transfer it to the male and make her way back to the distant sea to nourish herself and bring back food to her newborn chick.
The film documents the arduous journey emperor penguins undertake every autumn.Thousands of penguins leave the ocean to travel inland toward their traditional ancestral breeding grounds.This journey—and the subsequent months of incubation and chick-rearing—is defined by extreme environmental challenges:
The Trek: Penguins walk up to 100 kilometers (approx.62 miles) across the frozen, wind-swept Antarctic landscape.
The Mating Cycle: Once they arrive, they engage in courtship, eventually laying a single egg.The female transfers the egg to the male, who protects and incubates it under a fold of skin on his feet for two months while the female returns to the sea to feed.
Survival: The males huddle together to conserve heat in temperatures as low as −62 °C (−80 °F) without eating for months.The survival of the species relies on the precise timing of the parents' return and their ability to locate one another in the colony using unique vocal calls.
Themes: The film explores themes of endurance, monogamy, parental sacrifice, and the brutal reality of survival in the harshest climate on Earth, often framing the penguins' struggle in humanized, emotional terms.
Filming
The production team spent over 13 months at the Dumont d'Urville Station. Because the timing of the penguins' arrival at their breeding ground is not fixed, the crew had to be prepared to film daily. The documentary is noted for its lack of special effects, relying on raw, high-quality footage captured under extreme conditions.
