Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia.

“Evidence suggests they feel rather more oppressed by the British than by the heat,” Edwin said.

“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?”

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 watercolour superimposed unconvincingly on the landscape.

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

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.

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.

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.”

“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”

I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.