Button’s Reviews > Station Eleven > Status Update

The last paragraph:

'Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity: whatever became of the countries on the other side? If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thoughts of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.'

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.

'Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.'

'She thought of the opening monologue often in the months that followed, weighing those first words like coins or pebbles turned over and over in a pocket, but she was unable to come up with the next sentence.

He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.

'Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required.'

Gorgeous and Heideggerian and sad.

She was thinking about the way she'd always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.

Prediction time. Tyler is the prophet. He came from Jerusalem with a hefty awareness of its history on a plane that miraculously didn't carry the Georgia Flu. It explains the symbol, the Luli, the connection to EVERYONE. Yep.

'he had an idea--too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it--that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn't like one another anymore.'

Yep.

"'Supportive of my vision'? He'd adopted new speech patterns. But of course he had, because since she'd last seen him there had been eleven years of friends and acquaintances and meetings and parties, travel here and there, film sets, two weddings and two divorces, a child. It made sense, she supposed, that he would be a different person by now."

I love the specificity, her personal fixations.

'You look like an executive,' she said to herself in the mirror, and the thought that flitted behind this was You look like a stranger. She pushed it away.