✷ s t a t i o n e l e v e n ✷
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a science-fiction post-apocalyptic book told from different points of view. The story begins when a famous actor, Arthur Leander, dies while acting King Lear on stage. At the same time, a virus called the Georgia Flu starts to spread across the country, resulting in full hospitals and quick deaths. The book switches from before the pandemic and after it, following the journey’s of several people who are all, in someway, connected to Arthur.
Station Eleven doesn’t really talk much about the pandemic throughout the book, but the way these characters are surviving and living in the world, both old and new. It is thought provoking and makes me wonder about the life I am living.
The main idea that I got from this book was the idea that the world we live in today are full of sleepwalkers.
“ “No,” Dahlia said, “because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?” ”
During Clark’s interview with a woman named Dahli in Chapter 26, Dahlia believes that adulthood is full of ghosts doing “what’s expected to them”. She refers to them as high-functioning sleepwalkers, just going through the motions of life with a blank mind. They lack creativity and don’t have passion in whatever they’re doing. They aren’t questioning it because they believe this is what has to be done. It is similar to the effects of a drug, as mentioned by Dahlia. Sadly, this idea remains true for several people in our world today.
Most of us have been following the flow of society like robots and doing what’s expected of us. You grow from a toddler to a child, go to kindergarten, primary, college and then university, get a degree, work and have a family, then retire till your time ends. It’s a repetitive cycle. I’ve read books about a dystopian world that is controlled and everyone is kept in order. Everything is chosen for them: their jobs, matches and even when you die. In reality, our world is not far off.
Thankfully, there are still some people in this world with creative and questioning mindsets. Similar to Kirsten, Arthur, Miranda and the Symphony, they are creative and passionate in whatever they do and like to take risks, making them different from the rest of society. We, us teenagers, growing to become adults, should remember to cherish this creativity we have since childhood and hold onto it. We should continue to question ourselves and live life to the full.
Remember to be living, because "survival is insufficient".