Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

He likes to ride the electric streetcar to the end of the line, and then come back, watching the shift from small houses to larger houses to the commercial buildings downtown.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.

The trouble with Victoria, in Edwin’s eyes, is that it’s too much like England without actually being England. It’s a far-distant simulation of England, a watercolor superimposed unconvincingly on the landscape.

It was a cold night, and the moon was brilliant over New York City.

Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.

There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake in ignorance and by evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here. You wake on a book tour with several days left to go, and by evening you’re racing toward home, your suitcase abandoned in a hotel room.

This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.

When I wasn’t playing my violin in the airship terminal I liked to walk my dog in the streets between the towers. In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.