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731e907
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I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliche but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the mai..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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7c80798
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An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while u..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b4af74e
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We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c673490
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If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there's nothing that you cannot justify. There's nothing you can't survive, because there's nothing that you will not do.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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025becf
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The house is silent now and she feels like a stranger here. "This life was never ours," she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. "We were only ever borrowing it."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ead6b2a
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All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text:
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6d49688
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The thing with the new world," the tuba had said once, "is it's just horrifically short on elegance."
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new-world
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b9ab94b
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What's the point of doing all that work," Tesch asks, "if no one sees it?" "It makes me happy. It's peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn't really matter to me if anyone else sees it."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0c28354
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I'm just curious, how'd you get into this line of work?" "Gradually, and then suddenly"
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1582687
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If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? 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?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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8b7eb6c
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There are certain qualities of light that blur the years.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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04fed84
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A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0b3d9c8
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There was a reminder that the library was always seeking books, and that they paid in wine.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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67e6b75
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Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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3b305d0
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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 that she's too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here. There are tears in her eyes..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e1312b7
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I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped...
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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001a476
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Because survival is insufficient.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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bd435f9
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Hell is the absence of the people you long for
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a42d22e
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WHAT WAS LOST IN THE COLLAPSE: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile away.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a50a686
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The more we know about the former world, the better we'll understand what happened when it fell.
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cosy-catastrophe
former-world
end-of-the-world
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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8063eb8
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You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curbside, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you're in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through th..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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dbf1214
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The revelation of privacy: she can walk down the street and absolutely no one knows who she is. It's possible that no one who didn't grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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646dd90
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We long only to go home,' " Kirsten said. This was from the first issue, Station Eleven. A face-off between Dr. Eleven and an adversary from the Undersea. " 'We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth.' " --
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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9d46820
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No one had any idea, it turned out. None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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29284c3
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Everything ends. I am not afraid.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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fd1e4a6
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So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it.
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the-end
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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116723f
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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. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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2dba05b
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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.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ef479bc
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Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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bc906ed
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it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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3a0c0c3
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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. Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless? Do you remember when it seemed impossible that you'd get famous and I'd get a PhD?..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d6fd4d2
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You can't argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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2c6f941
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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.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b6c63be
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This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: "Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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253a342
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Time had been reset by catastrophe.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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109931f
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Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he'd been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin. And not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-s..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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590b0e0
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You know where I'm from," he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these th..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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07134ed
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Cold rain, the sidewalk shining, the shhh of car tires on the wet street. Thinking about the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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35afdf4
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I've heard of a dozen prophets over the years. It's not an uncommon occupation.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e0ef660
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standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ba04e4d
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That's the thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4f1cf5a
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It's like the corporate world's full of ghosts ... maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts ... these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed ... They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped ... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.
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ghosts
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6169337
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The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now?
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earth
humanity
extinction
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4cc8600
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But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: "Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking."
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Emily St. John Mandel |