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Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

Welp August's poem made me teary.

There are certain qualities of light that blur the years.

The forest was a dark mass on either side, alive and filled with indecipherable rustlings, shadows like ink against the glare of the moonlight.

'There was a sound just then, a disturbance passing over the surface of the night as quickly as a stone dropped into water.'

Poetry.

'Why would he marry a twelve-year-old?'
'He had a dream where God told him he was to repopulate the earth.'
'Of course he did,' the conductor said. 'Don't they all have dreams like that?'
'Right, I always thought that was a prerequisite for being a prophet,' Sayid said.

walking and walking until their thoughts burned out one by one like dying stars and they fell into a fugue state wherein all that mattered or had ever existed were these trees, this road, the counterpoint rhythms of human footsteps and horses' hooves, moonlight turning to darkness and then the summer morning, caravans rippling like apparitions in the heat

Diallo's presence on these pages makes me inestimably happy.

the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty.

'The disorientation of meeting one's sagging contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls, under-eye pouches, unexpected lines, and then the terrible realization that one probably looks just as old as they do.'

It's shallow, but I dread this.

'I don't think I'm an awful person,' Elizabeth says.
'No one ever thinks they're awful, even people who really actually are. It's some sort of survival mechanism.'
'I think this is happening because it was supposed to happen.'
'I'd prefer not to think I'm following a script,' Miranda says, but she's tired, there's no sting in her words, it's past four in the morning and too late in every sense.

I assume the paperweight Clark gave Miranda is the one Tanya gave to Kirsten? It's significance eludes me.

There are pools and eddies of conversation around the table.

'No, it's just, if eveything happens for a reason," Elizabeth persists, 'as personally I believe that it does, then when I hear a story of how two people came together, it's like a piece of the plan is being revealed.'

Precious. Although we know by now she's going to wreck the happy home of the two people who came together.

Between the rude/supposedly intellectually rigorous woman and Clark:

'"She lived in Praha, and--"
"Oh, I believe when you're speaking in English, you're allowed to refer to it as Prague."
Tesch appears to have lost the power of speech.'

Deeply satisfying.

'She tries to meet Arthur's gaze, but he's looking at Elizabeth.'

Oof. My heart.

'Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor.'

That someone found such succinct words for this makes me so happy.

'I repent nothing. A line remembered from the fog of the Internet. I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn't true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn't give it to them means she's that too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here.'

'When sober, he suggests that she's squandering her talent. When drunk, he implies that there isn't much there to squander, although later he apologizes and sometimes cries....She started to explain her project to him but the words stopped in her throat.
'You don't have to understand it,' she said. 'It's mine.'

Succinct, evocative summation of a familiar situation.

'They live out their lives under flickering lights, aware at all times of the fathoms of ocean above them, resentful of Dr. Eleven and his colleagues who keep Station Eleven moving forever through deep space....They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.'

Waiting for life to happen. Practice for limbo.

Miranda is working on a series of graphic novels: Dr/Station Eleven? It would make sense, since Arthur gave Kirsten the series.

If that's the case, there could be a connection between culty guy and Miranda? Or maybe he's at least read it?

Dog Luli. Familiar. Found it on p. 41. Dr. Eleven's dog.

'The audience rose for a standing ovation. Kirsten stood in the state of suspension that always came over her at the end of performances, a sense of having flown very high and landed incompletely, her soul pulling upward out of her chest.'

<3

'Because survival is insufficient.'

Loveliest, quietest, simplest defense of the arts.

'She never feels more alive than in these moments. When onstage she fears nothing.
...
Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape. And now in a twilight once more lit by candles, the age of electricity having come and gone, Titania turns to face her fairy king.'

Perfection.

'someone--probably Sayid--had written "Sartre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people" and substituted "flutes."'

Oh my goodness YES to ALL of it.

Glassesless:

'he'd lived in a confusing landscape distilled to pure color according to season--summer mostly green, winter mostly gray and white--in which blurred figures swam into view and then receded before he could figure out who they were.'

Familiar.

The bit with exes playing Oberon and Titania. Familiar, vivid, exquisitely uncomfortable.

It's both eerie and welcome that the Symphony travels mostly Michigan. Surreal.

"At the last minute, he added a bouquet of daffodils."

Unspeakably precious, sentimental thing for someone to do while frantically stocking up on survivalist necessities.