Read Maria's responses to popular apocalyptic literature. |
At the core of Station Eleven is art and music. The book is nothing without Miranda’s drawings, Arthur’s theatrical performances, or The Traveling Symphony’s devotion to sharing their music with the sad, silent remnant of the world. As a music major, I connected easily with Emily St. John Mandel’s narrative. For me, there couldn’t have been a better group of people to follow through the apocalypse than Mandel’s assortment of instrumentalists, actors, and artists. If I survived the Georgia flu, you can be absolutely certain the Symphony would have picked me up on one of their tours around Ohio. For those of you less inclined to the fine arts, you may ask why in the world—a plagued and empty world where you could get shot just for the bag on your back—would you travel around performing Shakespeare? The Symphony explains with a line borrowed from Star Trek, “Because survival is insufficient.” I whole-heartedly concur. But what happens when surviving means taking away the things that make life worth living? That is life for a lot of people during Covid-19. The pandemic has impacted every occupation, lifestyle, and industry, but the fine arts and performing arts is one of the areas hit the hardest. The Brookings study, published in August 2020, estimated losses of 2.7 million jobs and $150 billion in sales between just April and July 2020. The study emphasizes that “The creative economy is one of the sectors most at risk from the COVID-19 crisis…Any lasting damage to the creative sector will drastically undercut our culture, well-being, and quality of life.” Culture, well-being, and quality of life… Those three essentials were the driving force of the Symphony. These essentials define my own love of music, and as music-making was stripped from my life last March, my well-being, quality of life, and sense of culture distinctly diminished. It may be odd, but I can admit that I was jealous reading about the performances of The Traveling Symphony as a singer that has not sung with a choir in about a year. Yet again, apocalyptic narrative strikes a nerve for our coronavirus experience. Despite the devastation, the characters of Station Eleven find their way back to culture and art. I know that we will too. I choose to hope and I anticipate an abundance of music-making in the future. This too shall pass.
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