Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia.

The sky is aggressively blue.

“No small thing, happiness.

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

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

Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, this whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him. He feels somewhat deranged.

But doesn’t everything seem obvious in retrospect?

Earth was so crowded by then, and such swaths of it had been rendered uninhabitable by flooding or heat.

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.

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.

Is there an unease that’s specific to the sense of an invisible bureaucracy in motion around you?

What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”

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.”

It wasn’t her fault that the world she’d grown up in had ceased to exist.