Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. He likes sitting by his window. There’s a constant movement of people and ships. He doesn’t want to leave, so he stays.

The prairies are initially interesting, then tedious, then unsettling. There’s too much of them, that’s the problem. The scale is wrong. The train crawls like a millipede through endless grass. He can see from horizon to horizon. He feels terribly overexposed.

If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.

“Oh, just contemplating my next move, I suppose,” he always replies, or words to that effect. He has a sense of waiting for something. But what?

the music stopped so abruptly that the silence seemed like the next beat.

five or six minutes of an aggressively ugly street corner in Toronto, but with orchestral strings laboring to produce the idea of hidden beauty.

“This explanation might seem a little silly to us now, but they were grasping wildly for an explanation for the nightmare that had befallen them, and I think that in its outlandishness, the explanation touches upon the root of our fear: illness still carries a terrible mystery.”

“What’s it like writing such a successful book? What’s it like being Olive Llewellyn?” “Oh. It’s surreal, actually. I wrote three books that no one noticed, no distribution beyond the moon colonies, and then…it’s like slipping into a parallel universe,” Olive said. “When I published Marienbad, I somehow fell into a bizarre upside-down world where people actually read my work. It’s extraordinary. I hope I never get used to it.”

closed her eyes in order to live more completely in the music, cool air in her face, and for several minutes she was perfectly happy.

In Shanghai, Olive spent a combined total of three hours talking about herself and about her book, which meant talking about the end of the world while trying not to imagine the world ending with her daughter in it,

“I was just trying to write an interesting book,” Olive said. “There’s no message.” “Are you sure?” the interviewer asked.

She’d seen five of those tattoos, but that didn’t make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone’s skin.

Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?

Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.

was overcome by the strangeness of the moment, the disorienting sense of one reality slipping away and being replaced by another.

Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”

But I felt such impatience with my life. I turned back to the hotel, and found that I couldn’t go in. The hotel was the past. I wanted the future.

I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

“Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”

“My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next.