From the Bookshelf of 2015 Reading Challenge [Closed]…

No one looked at Jeevan, and it occurred to him that his role in this performance was done.
Just to be alone for a moment, while he decided where to go next. He stepped into the silence of park.
But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.
There was a moment on Earth, improbable in retrospect and actually briefer than a moment in the span of human history, more like the blink of an eye, when it was possible to make a living solely by photographing and interviewing famous people.

First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text:
Because survival is insufficient.
They’d performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.
People want what was the best about the world.

This collection of petty jealousies, neuroses, undiagnosed PTSD cases, and simmering resentments lived together, traveled together, rehearsed together, performed together 365 days of the year, permanent company, permanent tour.
Hell is other people.

In all these years, when Symphony members have become separated from the Symphony they followed the separation protocol.
We never travel without a destination.

"I treated Victoria like a diary."
"So all the time I saw you writing to her, she never wrong back?" She was surprised by how sad this made her.

Miranda rested the side of her face on the desk and considered the poverty of the room. Poverty not in the economic sense, but in the sense of not being enough for the gravity of the moment, an insufficient setting - for what?
She was thinking about the container-ship fleet on the horizon. The crew out there wouldn’t have been exposed to the flue. Too late to get to a ship herself now but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe.

“It’s just an awful thing to do.”
“I don’t think i’m an awful person,” Elizabeth says.
“No one ever think they’re awful, even people who really are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous.
You can’t argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic.

I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. They’ve done what’s expected of them, They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped.
I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction.
That’s what passes for a life, I should say. That’s what passes for happiness, for most people. Guys like Dan, they’re like sleepwalkers.

The news had worsened. The fabric was unraveling. It will be hard to come back from this, he thought, because in those first days it was still inconceivable that civilization might not come back from this at all.
The night sky was brighter than it had been. The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth.

He harbored a secret pleasure in the thought that the world was waking up.
If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars…