STATION ELEVEN Flashcards
Alexandra is “unsatisfied and
obviously thinking that if she’d seen a lit up computer screen she would have remembered it”
Since losing his glasses, the seventh guitar “lived in a confusing
landscape distilled to pure color according to season”
Jeevan, in the first few weeks after the collapse and ‘all his weeks indoors’, he observes a ‘stark
and unexpected beauty’ of the ‘silent metropolis, no movement’.
August and Kirsten fantasize about a ‘parallel universe where telephones
still work, so we could just call the symphony and ask where they are’
Upon the departure of the Los Angeles flight, “Clark realised he had tears in his eyes
Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognised the beauty of flight? The improbability of it.”
Tanya has an ‘appreciation
for nice things that comes only from having grown up with little money’
Clark has ‘this disorientation of meeting one’s sagging
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’
In Miranda’s last moments, she thinks about ‘the way she’d always taken
for granted that the world has certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of’
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’
When Miranda started panicking when she first felt sick she ‘spent some time sketching, trying to calm herself’
Before her passing, “the seascape bleeding
into confused visions of Station Eleven” is indicative of the blurring of margins between her fictitious realm and the physical world.
Captain Lonagan posits to Dr. Eleven that dying was ‘exactly like
waking up from a dream’.
Miranda draws “a rocky island with a
small house on it, lights on the horizon of Station Eleven’s dark sea”.
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
“I stood looking over my damaged home
and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth
The absence of light on “Station Eleven’s surface”, in that it’s always “perpetual
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.
Station Eleven’s characters live under “flickering lights”, cognisant
of the “fathoms of the ocean above them”, and “They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”
dr. Eleven after the death of Captain Lonagan
feels ‘like a stranger’
Kirsten also copes by imagining living on Station eleven as ‘she thinks
it’s beautiful’ and she ‘wouldn’t mind’ the perpetual twilight.
August - “does station eleven even have an orchestra? Or would it just be me
standing there by myself on the rocks in the dark, playing my violin for giant seahorses
‘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’
Arthur - “he remembered having enjoyed it back then, the challenge of living in a play before it started…
but now the lights were too close, too hot”
when with Arthur in Toronto, Miranda ‘wants to believe they are lying here in moonlight
but she knows the light through the window is probably mostly electric”.
the tabloid image of Arthur and Miranda leaving a restaurant as the ‘blinding flash’ ‘washed her [Miranda]
out so mercifully that in the photo version of that moment the bruise was erased’.
symbolically, when Clark meets up with Arthur a year before the collapse, he finds Arthur ‘caught under a beam
track lighting’
dinner party - “Once Clark sat with all of them in Los Angeles
at a table under electric light”
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”.
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’
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’
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’
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
Elizabeth is always seen ‘flashing a brilliant
smile with very red lips. But off screen she wears no lipstick and seems nervous and shy’.
“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.”
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’
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
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.
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
“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.
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”
‘from here, the dinner party looks like a diorama
, white walls and golden light and glamorous people’
the set of king Lear - ‘a high platform painted to look
like a balcony with elaborate pillars’
at the dinner party Miranda retreats to ‘where the
shadows are deepest’ rather than face Arthurs adultery
Kirsten copes by ‘placing herself in that other, shadow life’,
a parallel universe in which she was in ‘those tabloid pictures’.
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’.
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
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.’
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’.
Despite survivors having “lost…almost everything” from the wrath of the Flu, Mandel writes that
there is still such beauty” in the “altered world”.
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
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…’
although Miranda ‘loves her life’ where ‘moments of emptiness
are minimal’, she still feels ‘often lonely’
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.”
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’.
“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…”
Despite the Symphony’s purportedly “insufferable” nature and “hell being
other flutes or people”, it was some people’s “only home”.
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.
“‘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.”
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…’
Despite her finding the Symphony’s insistence on performing Shakespeare ‘insufferable’, the clarinet
loves the ‘music of the symphony, being a part of it’.
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’.
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
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.
“‘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.”
“in Traverse city… an inventor had rigged an electrical system in an attic…
it could power a laptop but the inventor had grander aspirations”
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’
