STATION ELEVEN Flashcards
1
Q
Alexandra is “unsatisfied and
A
obviously thinking that if she’d seen a lit up computer screen she would have remembered it”
2
Q
Since losing his glasses, the seventh guitar “lived in a confusing
A
landscape distilled to pure color according to season”
3
Q
Jeevan, in the first few weeks after the collapse and ‘all his weeks indoors’, he observes a ‘stark
A
and unexpected beauty’ of the ‘silent metropolis, no movement’.
4
Q
August and Kirsten fantasize about a ‘parallel universe where telephones
A
still work, so we could just call the symphony and ask where they are’
5
Q
Upon the departure of the Los Angeles flight, “Clark realised he had tears in his eyes
A
Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognised the beauty of flight? The improbability of it.”
6
Q
Tanya has an ‘appreciation
A
for nice things that comes only from having grown up with little money’
7
Q
Clark has ‘this disorientation of meeting one’s sagging
A
contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls… and then the terrible realisation that one probably looks just as old as they do’
8
Q
In Miranda’s last moments, she thinks about ‘the way she’d always taken
A
for granted that the world has certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of’
9
Q
In Miranda’s final harrowing moments the reality she created in her comic books provides her comfort - ‘she kept thinking of…
A
a translucent silhouette in the dim light of Dr. Eleven’s office’
When Miranda started panicking when she first felt sick she ‘spent some time sketching, trying to calm herself’
10
Q
Before her passing, “the seascape bleeding
A
into confused visions of Station Eleven” is indicative of the blurring of margins between her fictitious realm and the physical world.
11
Q
Captain Lonagan posits to Dr. Eleven that dying was ‘exactly like
A
waking up from a dream’.
12
Q
Miranda draws “a rocky island with a
A
small house on it, lights on the horizon of Station Eleven’s dark sea”.
13
Q
Kirsten’s preservation of the “Dr Eleven” series – written “by M.C.” - leads to a figure from the “pre-collapse … printing business” (diallo)
A
informing her that the “bright images” and “archival paper” is indicative of the books being “someone’s vanity project” as opposed to the product of “mass-produc[tion
14
Q
“I stood looking over my damaged home
A
and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth
15
Q
The absence of light on “Station Eleven’s surface”, in that it’s always “perpetual
A
twilight”, alludes to the monotony of the character’s life. Captain Lonagan’s assertion that “all they want is to see sunlight again” refers to Miranda’s longing to elude such repression of both her emotions and creative passion.
16
Q
Station Eleven’s characters live under “flickering lights”, cognisant
A
of the “fathoms of the ocean above them”, and “They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”
17
Q
dr. Eleven after the death of Captain Lonagan
A
feels ‘like a stranger’
18
Q
Kirsten also copes by imagining living on Station eleven as ‘she thinks
A
it’s beautiful’ and she ‘wouldn’t mind’ the perpetual twilight.
19
Q
August - “does station eleven even have an orchestra? Or would it just be me
A
standing there by myself on the rocks in the dark, playing my violin for giant seahorses
20
Q
‘we long only to go home, we dream of sunlight
A
we dream of walking on earth… we long only for the world we were born into’
21
Q
Arthur - “he remembered having enjoyed it back then, the challenge of living in a play before it started…
A
but now the lights were too close, too hot”
22
Q
when with Arthur in Toronto, Miranda ‘wants to believe they are lying here in moonlight
A
but she knows the light through the window is probably mostly electric”.
23
Q
the tabloid image of Arthur and Miranda leaving a restaurant as the ‘blinding flash’ ‘washed her [Miranda]
A
out so mercifully that in the photo version of that moment the bruise was erased’.
24
Q
symbolically, when Clark meets up with Arthur a year before the collapse, he finds Arthur ‘caught under a beam
A
track lighting’
25
dinner party - “Once Clark sat with all of them in Los Angeles
at a table under electric light"
26
Despite his recent demise, Jeevan notices “posters still advertising King Lear, with Arthur gazing
up into blue light ... and the dead Cordelia limp in his arms”.
27
For Clark, the realisation that the ‘worlds changes wouldn’t be reversed’
‘casts his memories in a sharper light’ and he remincises on seemingly mundane things that he otherwise didn’t value the significance of, like ‘the last time he danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane’
28
In the early days at Severn City Airport, Clark is ‘thinking ahead to a time when he’d sit
with Robert in a restaurant in New York or London and they’d raise a glass of wine to their tremendous good fortune at having made it through’
29
When Miranda speaks to Arthur years later, she can't tell if he is acting, and there is a ‘blurring of borders
between performance and life’ and ‘in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy’
30
Elizabeth says to clark “Do you ever
talk to him and get the sense that he's acting?” - Postulates that such heavy involvement of Arthur in his career has rendered the divide between reality and his work discernible
31
Elizabeth is always seen ‘flashing a brilliant
smile with very red lips. But off screen she wears no lipstick and seems nervous and shy’.
32
“did he actually date those women because he liked them, or was his career in
the back of his mind the whole time? The question was unexpectedly haunting.”
32
Garret and Clark ponder why they typed ‘thx’ instead of ‘thanks’ and they can’t ‘’fathom’
that ‘it would have taken too much time and effort to punch in an extra three letters’
33
Quentin telling Arthur as Lear to go on stage because it's a ‘good visual effect’
and he ‘likes the way it looks’ is emblematic of the superficial nature of Hollywood
34
The latter realisation that Arthur’s death necessitates a “call [to his] lawyer” as opposed to his “ex-wives”, “siblings [and] parents” highlights the seemingly lonesome life
led by Leander, one whereby his closest people learned of his personal life from “gossip magazines”. Thus, Mandel seeks to accentuate the isolation deriving from life before the cameras and under the scrutiny of strangers.
35
His decade-long friendship with Clark deteriorates, with their conversation pertaining to Elizabeth being “the last they spoke of anything of substance”. Their chatter then becomes trite and superficial, with the actor repeating words
that had featured in “Entertainment Weekly”. Clark then realises that “Arthur wasn’t having dinner with a friend”, he “was performing”. His capacity for authenticity has diminished markedly
36
“Nothing in Kristen's collection suggested the Arthur Leander she remembered…
Arthur was a fleeting impression of kindness and grey hair, a man who’d pressed two comic books into her hands”.
Contrarily, the impression that Hollywood created of Arthur, as evidenced through Kirstens ‘collected fragments’ of the pre collapse world through magazines and paparazzi photos, depicts Arthur in a completely different way to what Kirsten remembered.
37
Kirsten - “None of the older symphony members knew much about science
which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had to look things up on the internet”
38
‘from here, the dinner party looks like a diorama
, white walls and golden light and glamorous people’
39
the set of king Lear - ‘a high platform painted to look
like a balcony with elaborate pillars’
40
at the dinner party Miranda retreats to ‘where the
shadows are deepest’ rather than face Arthurs adultery
41
Kirsten copes by ‘placing herself in that other, shadow life’,
a parallel universe in which she was in ‘those tabloid pictures’.
42
August copes by imagining a ‘parallel universe’ in which there had been ‘no pandemic
and he’d grown up to be a physicist as planned’.
43
Clark then considers it a privilege to have seen “the remembered splendors
of the former world”, though this pierces him with “an admixture of sadness and exhilaration
44
Clark suggests that Arthurs ‘talent was obvious, but if you’d seen him before any of the rest of it, all the tabloids and movies and divorces,
the fame, all those warping things’ and that ‘back of the beginning… he was so kind, that's what I remembered most clearly. Kind to everyone he met. This humility about him.’
45
For Arthur, it takes him being in a position where he is unhappy with his life to realise the beauty of the past - ‘he remembered being here with Clark at three or for sometimes five in the morning,
during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream… clark had been magnificent actually, in retrospect’.
46
Despite survivors having “lost...almost everything” from the wrath of the Flu, Mandel writes that
there is still such beauty” in the “altered world”.
47
August had “spent an enormous amount of time before the collapse watching television” as
he was “quiet and a little shy… and had never been especially adept at getting along with people
48
The symphony was a collection of “... petty jealousies, neuroses, undiagnosed PTSD cases and simmering resentments…
made bearable by the friendships… the camaraderie, the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy…’
49
although Miranda ‘loves her life’ where ‘moments of emptiness
are minimal’, she still feels ‘often lonely’
50
Clark - “In his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He 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.”
51
the third cello - The necessity for connection is evident through the third cello who had only set out from being ‘holed up in the safety and boredom of a remote cottage
on Michigan's Upper Peninsula’ because he ‘feared he'd lose his mind if he didn't find another human being to talk to’.
52
“These towns had fought off ferals, buried their neighbours lived and died and suffered together
in the blood drenched years just after the collapse, survived against unspeakable odds and then only by holding together into the calm…”
53
Despite the Symphony’s purportedly “insufferable” nature and “hell being
other flutes or people”, it was some people’s “only home”.
54
Despite the marked age gap, Arthur warms to the idea of befriending Miranda as “she’ll know where [he’s] from"
in order to ease his “constant state of disorientation”. Thus, Mandel highlights individuals’ need for even the most marginal sense of belonging.
55
“‘I wish you would try a little harder’ Arthur has said to her once or twice
but she knows she’ll never belong here no matter how hard she tries. These are not her people. She is marooned on a strange planet.”
56
Clark also copes with the adversity of the post-collapse world by making friends with Dolores - 'he'd begun to think of her as his closest
friend. They’d spent a pleasantly companionable day indoors…’
57
Despite her finding the Symphony's insistence on performing Shakespeare ‘insufferable’, the clarinet
loves the ‘music of the symphony, being a part of it’.
58
dysfunctionality of relationships in both the personal and corporate contexts. Arthur Leander, rues the fact that he has ‘three ex-wives – a sign of
[having gone] significantly wrong’.
59
The new arrival at the airport “crying” was attributed to
his thinking that “[he] was the only one”. Thus, consolation derived from mere act of companionship
60
Despite Elizabeth being the actor’s ex-wife and mother of their son, the Heller proclaims that “she’s hardly
family, is she?” Underscores entrenched expectations of Hollywood and the ostensibly fleeting, superficial nature of relationships within.
61
“‘people want what was best about the world’ Dieter said. He himself found
it difficult to live in the present. He’d played in a punk band in college and longed for the sound of an electric guitar.”
62
“in Traverse city… an inventor had rigged an electrical system in an attic…
it could power a laptop but the inventor had grander aspirations”
63
As a child, August loved television, so post collapse, similar to Kirsten, he had a propension to, when they broke into houses, ‘search for issues of Tv guides’, and
‘books of poetry’, and he liked to ‘flip through them later at quieter moments’
64
“When Kirsten was in the houses, she searched for celebrity gossip magazines
because once, when she was sixteen years old, she’d flipped through a magazine… and found her past”
65
the way in which we try to hold onto what was good about the past is illustrated through August who, after the symphony had had cocktails at a ‘golf course clubhouse’,
had been ‘trying to replicate the experience ever since’.
66
AUgust proffers that the museum is a ‘place where artefacts from the old world are preserved’ to which Finn replies
that ‘the entire world is a place where artefacts from the old world are preserved.’
67
“In year 15 people came to the museum to look at the past after their long days of work..
And what happened there was something like a prayer” - “James, the first man who walked in, came to the museum almost every day to look at the motorcycle.”
68
“the library was Francois’s favourite place in his present life. He had accumulated
a sizable collection over the years. Books, magazines, a glass case of pre-collapse newspapers”.
69
the clarinet soothes herself amidst being held by the prophets men by ‘dreaming of a room, a rehearsal space at college,
an impression of laughter’ and she ‘tried to cling to these shreds’ - memory provides comfort
70
‘It is possible to survive this, but not unaltered
and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life’.
71
Kirsten wonders that the prophet was ‘just another dead man on another
road… the bearer of another unfathomable story’. perhaps he’d “once been a boy adrift... and had the misfortune of remembering everything”.
72
Jeevan was ‘soothed’ by the ‘interior paradise’ of the
Allan Gardens that reminded him of a ‘long ago vacation in cuba’, as he attempts to reconcile himself with the news of the imminent pandemic
73
‘we stand it because we were younger than you were when everything ended’. ‘Kirsten found
herself wondering.. If it was better or worse to have never known any world except the one after the Georgia flu’.
74
Clark then considers it a privilege to have seen “the remembered splendours of the former world”
though this pierces him with “an admixture of sadness and exhilaration”
75
Viola, upon the collapse of the modern world, was “whispering French to herself because
all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her”.
76
Garret [clarks friend] is also tormented by his memories and regret in that his last phone call was to his boss and the ‘last words he'd spoken into a telephone were a bouquet of corporate
cliches, seared horribly into a memory’.
77
“He’d been spending more time in the past lately. He liked
to close his eyes and let his memories overtake him"
78
“this was why she stopped trying to remember her lost year on the road...
what [it] contained, she realised it was nothing she wanted to know about”.
79
“I have walked all my life through this tarnished world...
and I have seen such darkness, such shadows and horrors”.
80
Mandel underscores the ability of memories to accentuate anguish and torment us in that for the boy who followed the prophet, ‘remembering
what we did, it just guts me’. leading him The boy’s shooting the prophet “in the head” before “clos[ing] his lips around the barrel and fir[ing]” is his only means of liberation from a life plagued with hardship and oppression. He is encumbered by horrible memories that perpetuate his suffering and death is the only exit to him.
81
Jeevan in his early days perpetually fearing ‘every sound that might mean the end of everything’ and ‘every shadow’
as it could always be ‘hiding someone with a gun who wanted to take his backpack’ so it was ‘dangerous to fall asleep’. ‘the road was all travellers with shell shocked expressions, people getting killed for the contents of their backpacks, hungry dogs and gunshots’.
82
Mandel emphasises society’s reliance on human interaction in pointing out that although we ‘bemoan the impersonality of the modern world’, it was never really ‘impersonal’
because when human interaction stopped with the pandemic, there was closing of “grocery stores”, locking and looting of businesses and ultimately, the “halt [of the] entire operation”. Watching the systems of the world fail from his brother’s apartment, Jeevan reflects on how interconnected people had been without realising it. Though the modern era is said to be lonelier than others, there was always an unseen network of people working hard to maintain the electrical grid and deliver goods.
83
To kirsten things like ‘leaving garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to
some invisible place’ and ‘slips of paper that can be traded for anything’ and ‘all of the information in the world’
84
Despite survivors having “lost...almost everything” from the wrath of the Flu,
Mandel writes that “there is still such beauty” in the “altered world”.
85
kirsten - “She never feels more alive than in these moments.
When onstage she fears nothing” - Passion for art can rid feelings of fear amidst adversity
86
the ‘jagged scar’ on Kirstens cheek
is ‘half erased by the candlelight’ of the symphonies performance of a Midsummers night's dream is symbolic of the ability of art and beauty to detract from the adversity of the post-collapse world.
87
Even in the most dire moments in this ‘blood-drenched world’ the appreciation of nature is celebrated. As Kirsten faces imminent death at the hands of the Prophet - she looks ‘beyond him’
to take in ‘the brilliant blue sky, [and the] leaves blowing in the wind’, dispelling patterns of light.”
88
Arthur - “He tells people, performing a gesture that suggests greater and greater height over the years
until he realises at some point in his mid forties that he's describing plants that stand seven or eight feet tall ‘just unbelievable in retrospect''
89
“He’ll remember this as a golden period when they could walk
out of restaurants together without anyone taking pictures of them on the sidewalk”
90
“Jeevan had been prone to cinematic daydreams lately…
his favourite movie involved waking in the morning to the sound of a loudspeaker, the army coming in and announcing that it was all over”.
91
“... plague closed the theatres again and again, death flickering over the landscape. And now
a twilight once more lit by candles, the age of electricity having come and gone, Titiana turns to face her fairy king”
91
“... plague closed the theatres again and again, death flickering over the landscape. And now
a twilight once more lit by candles, the age of electricity having come and gone, Titiana turns to face her fairy king”
92
Following their performance of MSND the prophet says the symphonies performance was a ‘beautiful respite
from our daily cares’
93
Viola ‘takes on the name
of her instrument’ after the collapse.
94
“She [kirsten] never feels more alive than in
these moments. When onstage she fears nothing”
95
Despite his recent demise, Jeevan notices “posters still advertising King Lear
with Arthur gazing up into blue light ... and the dead Cordelia limp in his arms”. - art can surpass the barriers posed by death
96
Mandel elucidates the perpetuity of art through the way in which, despite being in a life she ‘mostly couldn’t
remember’, Kirsten still remembers her role in a production of Kings Lear before the collapse, passion forms an integral part of what we remember
97
kirsten - Despite not being able to remember her “street address, her mother’s face or TV shows”, she “collected fragments”
of the “pre-collapse” world.
98
At the end of kirstens performances, she has a “sense
of having flown every high
99
Mandel communicates the ability of literature to fleetingly whisk those who are constantly “engaged in the tasks
of survival” away from their “difficult...work-worn” lives. Kirsten thinks it ‘meant something to see titania in a gown’ . The tuba says that the worst part of the new world is that it's ‘horrifically short on elegance’
100
Despite “imprecision creeping in”, Miranda recalls Arthur’s
father speaking with “great animation about a poet”. Thus, Mandel conveys literature’s ability to create a sense of unity amongst individuals with little common ground and bring joy.
101
Despite the archer’s purported brutality, he was “smiling,
his eyes wet in the candlelight” upon hearing the Symphony play. Thus, elucidating the positive impact that art can have and highlighting individuals’ malleability and propensity to resort to violence amidst conflict, irrespective of one’s true character.
102
The debilitating feeling we get when we are unable to fulfil our passions is highlighted through Arthur, who when he “couldn’t quite reach
good acting.. feels like a man in a wheelchair watching people run”.
103
when Clark is interviewing Dahlia, she comments that ‘adulthoods
full of ghosts’
104
in an epiphanous moment, Clark realises that he too had been ‘half asleep through the motions
of his life for a while now, not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work’
105
Clark has established a real reputation and purpose for himself, as evidenced by the fact that traders often ‘brought
things for Clark… objects of no real value that they knew he would like.”
105
Clark has established a real reputation and purpose for himself, as evidenced by the fact that traders often ‘brought
things for Clark… objects of no real value that they knew he would like.”
106
the ability of finding a passion to brighten our lives is symbolised through the Clarinet who had been ‘lit up’
by ‘an obsession with twenty first century experimental German theatre’ in her sophomore year of college,
and it is her not being able to get the symphony to play something ‘modern that addressed the age in which they'd somehow landed’ that she finds ‘insufferable’ and brings her anguish.
107
miranda to arthur - “What a wonderful
thing, to get paid for doing what you love.” Underscores the often-repressed desire to pursue a life of passion; highlights the largely monotonous nature of life in contemporary society
108
“It's the work that's important to me… not whether
i publish it or not” - Miranda “what's the point in doing all that work… if no one sees it?” - Tesch, “it makes me happy” - Miranda - Disregarding teschs insinuation that work must reap recognition, Miranda asserts that what's important is that it makes her happy
109
Despite being a highly successful lawyer, there are rumours that Heller ‘doesn’t
sleep at night’
110
Despite the adversity of the post collapse world, AUgust still leads a meaningful life because acting is his passion and he wouldn’t be fulfilled without it - ‘in what other
would I get to perform Shakespeare’.
111
When clark is interviewing Dahlia, she posits that her boss Dan will always be a ‘successful but unhappy
person’ and is someone who ‘seems like he wishes he’d done something different with his life’
Dahlia asserts that it's ‘like the corporate world is full of ghosts’
112
Dahlia confirms that ‘she's talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another
and they are just so disappointed… they want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, they’re trapped’
113
Jeevan feels tormented by the triviality of his own life and his career in that “some people do things that actually
matters”, whilst he asks himself, ‘what kind of career is this? What kind of life?’ - 'directionless life’
114
Arthur is essentially a high functioning sleepwalker. He is technically successful in society's terms but to Miranda there is a ‘disappointment… that
had settled over his face, and a strained quality about his eyes..’
115
“Clark was beginning to imagine Heller as a sort of bat, some kind of sinister night-living vampire lawyer…”, he then ‘revised his mental image
from hanging upside down bat lawyer to sad, pale, caffeine addicted man with insomnia’ upon hearing a ‘crack in Hellers voice, sadness or exhaustion’
116
Clark “kept impeccable
records” of “impractical” objects, both “beautiful and strange”.
117
jeevan ‘liked being the man to whom people turned
in bad moments, it meant a great to him to be able to help…’
118
‘we long only to go home, we dream of sunlight, we dream
of walking on earth… we long only for the world we were born into’
119
Arthur regrets the superficiality of his life in that ‘he'd spent his entire life chasing
after something, money or fame or immortality or all of the above’.
120
Mandel highlights the ability of photos to immortalise us through the image Kirsten and August find in the untouched house of ‘a boy with his parents
all of them beaming and resplendent with life’. juxtaposed with the former mention of the child a “husk in the bed”.
121
‘I watch movies of long-dead actors on the screen
and I think about how they’ll never truly die’, and ‘not just the famous ones… but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler…’
122
jeevan day dreams about people 'congratulating
him on his foresight in stocking up food’
123
it is because of kirstens ‘collection, the clippings’ that she ‘understands something
about permanent records’ so to her, killing is not something she ‘wants to be remembered for’
124
Mandel further accentuates the ability of literature to immortalise people and fragments of history “the mystery
audience member who knew CPR. He’s in the New York Times obituary”, whom Kirsten – despite not knowing his name – remembers as being “kind to [her]”,
125
“Nothing in Kristen's collection suggested the Arthur Leander she
remembered…. Arthur was a fleeting impression of kindness and grey hair, a man who’d pressed two comic books into her hands
126
"A woman [tanya] had given it to her [kirsten] just before
the collapse, but she couldn’t remember the womens name”
127
She liked to look through the clippings sometimes, a steadying habit
she’d memorised the details of every one”.
128
Arthur “likes the idea
of returning to Canada in triumph” - Entrenched in Arthur is the desire to be commemorated.
129
"It was becoming more difficult to hold onto himself [jeevan]
He tried to keep up a litany of biographical facts as he walked, trying to anchor himself to this life, to this earth.”
130
Clark, reminiscing upon his life pre-collapse, avers that “Robert was a curator...
if [he] were here...he’d probably fill the shelves with artefacts and start an impromptu museum”
131
Our yearning to memorialise those we loved is illustrated by Clark who in year nineteen always wears a ‘lufthansa
neck scarf in memory’ of his friend Annette.
132
Mandel underscores our yearning to be remembered in good light in that in Kirstens seemingly final moments she is ‘thinking of trying to
do something heroic, sending a knife spinning through the air as she fell’
133
Arthur reconsiders what “his life was going to mean”, thus wanting to be “known as the man
who gave his fortune away”.
134
The Symphony’s state of “permanent tour” was revealed to have been made “bearable” by the “friendships ...
the camaraderie ... the music and the Shakespeare” - “moments of transcendent ... joy”.
135
‘Even after all these years there were moments when he [jeevan] was overcome by his
good fortune at having found this place, this tranquillity, this woman, at having lived to see a time worth living in’.
136
-Dieter is insistent on playing Shakespeare as ‘he had lived in a plague ridden society with no electricity and so did the Travelling Symphony’ yet the Clarinet
Clarinet recognises that ‘the difference was that they'd seen electricity, they'd seen everything, they watched a civilization collapse and Shakepeare hadn’t.’
137
“The night sky was a wash of light in Galileo's age and it was a wash of light now
The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricty. The thought sent shivers up Clarks spine”.
138
"A sea of pink flowers had
risen between the shards of buildings”
139
“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?”
140
Amidst the ruins of Severn City, a ‘flowering vine
had taken over most of the post office and extended across the street’
141
people of the undersea are perpetually 'clinging to the hope
that the world they remembered could be restored’.
142
The mundanity and superficiality of day to day life is symbolised through Captain Lonogan who, following his death and return as a ghost, posits to Dr. Eleven that dying was ‘exactly
like waking up from a dream’.
143
In Miranda's final harrowing moments the reality she created in her comic books provides her comfort - ‘she kept thinking of…
a translucent silhouette in the dim light of Dr. Eleven's office’.
144
Kirsten’s preservation of the “Dr Eleven” series – written “by M.C.” - leads to a figure from the “pre-collapse ... printing business” (diallo) informing her that the
bright images” and “archival paper” is indicative of the books being “someone’s vanity project” as opposed to the product of “mass-produc[tion]”. Thus, Mandel insinuates that true passion eradicates the need for external validation – as is frequently the case in Hollywood – and that it can often pose as a metaphorical escape from the anguish of the physical world.
145
The importance of connection is also illustrated through dr. Eleven who after the death of Captain Longagan feels
‘like a stranger’
146
Kirsten also copes by imagining living on Station eleven as ‘she thinks it's
beautiful’ and she ‘wouldn’t mind’ the perpetual twilight.
147
MIRANDA - Before her passing, “the seascape
bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven”
148
“Her gaze falls on the gift that Clark brought this evening, a paperweight of
clouded glass. When she holds it it's a pleasing weight in the palm of her hand. It's like looking into a storm.”
149
“It [the paperweight] was of no practical use whatsoever, nothing
but dead weight in the bag but she found it beautiful.” “A woman had given it to her just before the collapse, but she couldn’t remember the womens name”
150
The sky, alongside airplanes, are equipped by Mandel to convey their ability to instil in survivors a sense of hope: “If I
ever saw an airplane, that meant somewhere planes still took off...I kept looking at the sky”.
151
Arthur's wistfulness and yearning for the past is elucidated through the motif of the dear V comics in which he reminisces on past moments with Victoria, such as ‘staying up all night
to see the comet’ and ‘playing mahjong with her mother’.
152
The “station’s artificial sky [having been]
damaged in the war” somewhat foreshadows the flu’s imminence, in that all hope was obliterated by the pandemic and the subsequent implications.
153
Jeevans unhappiness with his ‘directionless life’ and the legacy he is creating for himself is fortified through the metaphor of him ‘not liking
the footprints he was leaving behind’, when he leaves his apartment.
154
WHen looking at a lamp, she observes that in the reflection, “the fake moon, which has the advantage
of being closer and not obscured by the smog, is almost always brighter than the real one”
155
There are stars tonight.. Although most
are blanked out by the haze of the city”
156
‘from here, the dinner party looks
like a diorama, white walls and golden light and glamorous people’
157
the set of king lear - ‘a high platform painted
to look like a balcony with elaborate pillars’
