I live near a nuclear power plant, in that first ring of danger. Our discussion when moving here was we’d want to be wiped out instantly, not linger in the after effects. I’m really not the survival type either. When I see these doomsday preppers I just think…who’d want to live in a world like that anyway?
The Girl Scout in me likes to think I’d be the surviving type, but while I can plant a vegetable garden, I have seen a hunting rifle since I was nine, much less ever handled one. We’re not as bothered by suburban deer as some communities but even we have some and wild turkeys too!
I’d love to say without Arthur there would have been no traveling symphony etc. But he’s not a catalyst, just a connection. I think the basic outlines would be the same. What Arthur did was provide a tenuous thread between very disparate people. Those connections remained even after the disaster.
^^^The tenuous connections exist but without Arthur’s death, the connections part fades. If Elizabeth and Tyler and Clark don’t need to go to Arthur’s funeral, their paths don’t cross - much less with that of Kirsten’s later.
I think Arthur has the best death: quick and before the fear, heartache of the flu. He dies doing what he loves with no idea what’s coming.
I’d be dead on Day 1. Nice knowing you all.
As to the long brutal winters, I am thinking that maybe by Year 20, the survivors would have learned to live like early Native Americans, who managed well in harsh locales. Here’s Michigan specifically: http://www.northernexpress.com/michigan/article-5543-the-indians-in-winter.html
For nitty gritty details on how the Station Eleven characters survived, I think it would have to be a much longer book, ala The Stand. If I recall, Stephen King goes into more of the gory detail (doesn’t he always?) about how the survivors kept themselves alive in the early days (following a deadly virus like the Georgia flu).
As some have suggested, it is possible that Arthur’s death saved his son’s life. Unfortunately, it also set him up to kill others and be killed. It may have also saved Clark’s life, facilitating the creation of Clark’s museum.
I agree with this. That’s why I said I didn’t think they would plant tobacco (although some may have known of wild plants they could smoke, as I believe PlantMom implied). I believe that they would struggle to cultivate enough food crops to feed people, and never would have wasted their efforts on tobacco.
As to living like the Indians did, the Indians learned to interact with their environment over untold stretches of time. How could non-Native Americans survivors learn the same skills quickly enough?
Might the survivors have ranged around and collected every farm animal they could find, and bred them for meat? But farm animals have to eat too. Maybe some of the animals could survive solely by grazing or whatever, but probably not in the winter in Michigan.
It’s easy to say that the author should have addressed this sort of thing. It always nagged at the back of my mind. But if she had, Station Eleven would have been a different book. It’s a fantasy, and I don’t think you’re supposed to analyze it too closely.
Edit: I just noticed your reference to The Stand, Mary13. I’ve never read that book. Did survivors resort to cannibalism?
I totally agree. She wanted to world-build, and this is how she did it. Other books talk about the ‘how’. This book wants to talk about something else.
No, but that gruesome scenario plays a part in The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Everyone (well, almost) is more civilized and organized in The Stand. They all migrate to one area of the country, set up ad hoc committees that each deal with different aspects of the aftermath (corpse removal, fresh water supply, etc.) – and they still manage to find time to fight Evil. It’s a fantasy, too, but absorbing and a surprisingly quick read. Gotta love the Apocalypse.
I too wondered about Arthur’s home island. Places like that might have survived mostly intact.
^^^ Unless someone traveling home to the island carried the flu with them.
I think Frank’s death falls somewhat into the heroic category. He’s in no hurry, waiting out the flu in safety till it can no longer be done. He’s realistic about his chances for survival and know he only hampers Jeevan. He chooses to end his life quietly when time comes to leave the apartment. I think he senses his little brother can survive on his own as well as anyone - in other words, it’s partly a matter of luck. Frank’s death is an act of love as much as surrender.
Late to the party because I was on a family vacation (sun, beaches), returning to a sometimes unrecognizable snowy world, and read most of the book on the plane. Which was perfect for this selection! I loved the book, even though it’s not my usual type. I did find all the many connections contrived, but I didn’t care.
Thank you, Mary, for starting with Czeslaw Milosz, who is a perfect choice for the epigraph. Since this is CC–his book The Captive Mind, was one of my selections for a “best/most influential book” transfer application essay!
In it, he refers to Communism as the “New Faith,” where art is suspect if it does not explicitly serve social ends, and where conformity of belief (at least openly) was required. I thought of the prophet in this sense–more as an example of a totalitarian society than as a religion.
I also saw parallels with Milosz’s exile (which he writes of in many of his poems) and Arthur’s relationship with Miranda:
From a 1986 poem called “And Yet the Books”:
The Traveling Symphony keeps performing Beethoven and Shakespeare, Jeevan’s brother keeps working, Clark initially keeps working on his reports, then starts the museum.
Milosz also translated As You Like It and some of Othello into Polish.
(I do have a quibble with that Artful Dodge piece you linked, which says that in 1951 Milosz “chose to settle in the West.” He defected while on a diplomatic assignment in Paris, having been told he would be arrested if he returned to Poland (where he was unable to return until the fall of the Iron Curtain). And I believe his family was still in the U.S. (where he had previously been posted) and he was not able to get a visa to join them for quite a while. Not exactly a choice in the usual sense.)
I love the references to books in buenavista’s poem and Mary’s quote from Alas, Babylon.
From Ignatius:
And as you know, I think this would have been great, since I despise the prophet part of the story! As long as we’re having an apocalyptic destruction of human society, wouldn’t it be wonderful to selectively eliminate the horrible people of this world? Unfortunately in a real-deal event, I suppose, barring a reverse “rapture” removing “evil-doers” only,we’re stuck with each other, warts and all. Perhaps I’ll have to accept the presence of the prophets. A few years ago on a long rainy night, I watched some back-to-back episodes of a survivalist show on TV with my stepfather. I don’t remember the title (maybe Doomsday Preppers?), but the set up for each episode involved looking at a group of people getting ready for an apocalyptic event of some sort like a virus, nuclear war, natural disaster…you get the idea. These people, real people living now(!), were spending a good chunk of their time preparing for their vision of how they’d live after said event. I was surprised at how many were hoarding weapons in addition to food and water, firewood, etc., and talking about how they’d defend themselves against their fellow human survivors who weren’t as well prepared. They were preparing for ultimate violence. It was kind of sickening, if there’s anything representative about people in a show like this, to see the view we hold upon our own society is so dim that we’d choose to isolate ourselves and defend to the death our stashes of essentials. We were joking around about it, but at that time I said I would choose the single “kumbaya” group that was getting ready to enjoy the companionship of their fellow human survivors while sitting around the campfire. I guess that deposits me in the symphony, or with the library dwellers 
What I liked most about this book were the respectful, helpful, and hopeful parts: the airport survivors, the sight of an electrified village, the Augusts praying over the long dead, the symphony spreading and reseeding art. Is it too optimistic to think the majority of survivors would be good people?
From eyemamon:
Last year my husband and I went on a field trip (plant group) about wild edible plants. Our leader was accustomed to training survivalists. We both left thinking that we’d starve if we were left to gather our own food in the wild The best source of easily available plant calories based on effort expended to gather plant foods–and we’re in the sunshine state!–would be a non-native sweet potato with a huge tuberous edible portion that grows in the dirt. Good luck finding this plant when you’re looking for it!
@buenavista, glad you’re here! Thank you for the additional information on Czeslaw Milosz. As I posted earlier, I didn’t know anything about him, but everything I read just made me want to read more. I loved your excerpt from And Yet the Books and am going to quote the entire poem below because one of the lines made me think of SouthJerseyChessMom’s post #125, where she wondered if, post-collapse, books might be burned for other uses.
Wow, aren’t we book club members getting all weepy and sentimental about books? How fitting. 
I’m with you. That’s one of the reasons I like Clark so much. He’s just a good man. Not an action hero with guns blazing, simply a compassionate, kind, helpful person. I’d like to think that this would be the norm rather than the exception. I believe Mandel feels the same, because it is not only her major characters, but the minor ones, too, who show common decency—such as the man with Amex card, or the midwife who quietly warns Kirsten, or the travelers Jeevan meets on the road.
Clark is a great character. His new life after the flu allowed him to get his “old self” back. He cut his hair back to a style he couldn’t have as a professional. Like Jeevan, he found purpose and happiness in his post flu life.
After I wrote the above, I wondered if “happiness” was the right word. Maybe “satisfaction” would be a better word? Clark missed his lover and the story didn’t really tell us if he found someone new. I wonder if he was happy.
We talked earlier about several Shakespearean motifs, but here is another that struck me: “Miranda” is also the name of a character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and she, too, grew up on a remote island. The Miranda of The Tempest speaks the famous words:
*O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t! /i
Her speech makes me think of the comic book world of “Station Eleven” and the Undersea, created by the Miranda of the novel. There is an ambiguous connotation to the words “brave new world”—thanks mostly to Aldous Huxley. The phrase is now defined, “used to refer, often ironically, to a new and hopeful period in history resulting from major changes in society.” However, the speech by Miranda of The Tempest is joyful. I see the path of Station Eleven—despite the collapse and all that followed—as more positive than negative. It’s not so much a dying world (like The Road), but one being reborn. A reader on Goodreads termed the book a “post-apocalyptic pre-Utopia,” which I thought was a good way of capturing the note of hope on which the book ends.
** Mary** from your link about Indian survival -
How did you know I have been wondering how the Indians survived harsh winter weather?Last night I saw a beautiful full moon here in NJ, it’s beauty tinged with the fact it’s " the hunger moon".
Thanks for that link.
And,Mary you, and others , made me laugh outloud when I read
Eyeamamon- sees the **benefit **of living near a nuclear plant so she is early causality
Ignatius- likes Frank’s way out ( so do I )
Plant mom- thinks the armed survivalists are wackos- and will be gathering edible plants somewhere far from the armed militias.
There isn’t a Katnis among us? What wimps we are!
Count me in on the day one, “I’m -outta -here -crowd”.
My cousin has a huge cache of organic survivalist food.
Really? Organic? Who cares about organic in the bunker ? Lol
Regarding Arthur’s importance to story, I agree with all, he was an insignificant part of the storyline, and this addresses the lack of emotional bonds between the characters. When Jeevan leaves his brother, I should have been grabbing tissues. This book didn’t have the emotional depth. Even The Hunger Games had more soul than this story.
Perhaps it was the authors intention, to keep us on the surface of thing, to juggle us back in forth in time, and point of view, so that we felt the " chill, the upheaval, the chaos" of being a survivor? And, with that no attachment to characters, no love story, or real bonds between parent and child ?
Crossed posted with mary13 - I’ve wondered about that question above - and also the importance station eleven.