Emily St. John Mandel

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle the most with it are the people who remember the old world clearly?
DIALLO: I hadn’t thought about it.
RAYMONDE: What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.

There is too much world

“I’m no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”

I am holding hands with my mother. I am very small. We are in Caiette, picking mushrooms in the woods. A memory, but it’s a memory so vivid that there’s a feeling of time travel, of visiting the actual moment. What a pleasure to be here again! “Oh look, my lamb,” she says, stooping to pluck a fluted little orange shape from the dark earth, “this one is a chanterelle.”

I’m on the beach, not far from the pier where the mail boat comes in, and my mother is here. She’s sitting some distance away, on a driftwood log, hands folded on her lap, with an air of waiting calmly for an appointment. Her hair is still braided, she’s still thirty-six years old, still in the red cardigan she was wearing the day she disappeared. It was an accident, of course it was, she would never have left me on purpose. She has waited so long for me. She was always here. This was always home. She’s gazing at the ocean, at the waves on the shore, and she looks up in amazement when I say her name.

I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

Is there an unease that’s specific to the sense of an invisible bureaucracy in motion around you?

“My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.”