Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

What inspired Edwin to speak just then? He found himself dwelling on the matter years later, at war, in the terminal horror and boredom of the trenches. Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.

“And yet one can’t help but notice,” Edwin said, “that on balance, they rather seem to prefer their own. Their own civilization, that is. They managed quite well without us for some time, didn’t they? Several thousand years, wasn’t it?” It was like being strapped to the roof of a runaway train! He actually knew very little about India, but he remembered having been shocked as a boy by accounts of the 1857 rebellion. “Does anyone want us anywhere?” he heard himself ask. “Why do we assume these far-flung places are ours?”

Isn’t that why we’re here? To leave a mark on wilderness?”

He doesn’t understand them and therefore finds them menacing.

For the first time, Edwin begins to worry about his sanity.

This was the downside to having retained a few friends from her time with Faisal—there were dangerous places here and there, places where she could get sucked into memories of another life, and this terrace was among them.

we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic.

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.

We knew it was coming and we prepared accordingly, or at least that’s what we told our children—and ourselves—in the decades that followed. We knew it was coming but we didn’t quite believe it, so we prepared in low-key, unobtrusive ways—“Why do we have a whole shelf of canned fish?” Willis asked his husband, who said something vague about emergency preparedness—

We knew it was coming and we were breezy about it. We deflected the fear with careless bravado. On the day

Dov, practicing his lines in front of the bedroom mirror after the community theater closed: “Is this the promised end?”

We knew it was coming but we behaved inconsistently.

I’ve always loved rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.

There are words you encounter all your life without knowing what they mean.

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.

“Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,” Dion said.

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

if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.

about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.