Learning Hope from Literary Apocalypse
Mackenzie Davis as KIRSTEN / Danielle Zovatto as THE PROPHET in HBO’s adaptation of Station Eleven
Among my trades that keep the lights on, I’m a writing and literature professor. In my college English classes, we study the rhetoric of utopia and dystopia, examining how civilizations collapse, emerge, and transform. This semester, I’ve been teaching Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
My paperback copy of the novel is battered, dog-eared, and flagged with fluorescent notes. Pastel highlights in pink and yellow line the text, alongside copious notes scrawled in gel-pen—a personal cartography of marginalia, likely illegible to anyone but myself. I mark my copy with each reading, leaving behind reminder of who I was and what I was thinking then upon my last encounter of those pages. The first time I read Station Eleven was in the early days of the covid pandemic, and now I return to those heavily lined pages, looking again for a remedy to despair.
Station Eleven is a love letter to the endurance of humanity and a roadmap to surviving the unimaginable. In Mandel’s novel, a deadly virus eradicates 99% of the world’s population, leaving survivors clinging to the remnants of a collapsed world. Mandel shows us what a total breakdown of our contemporary society looks like: there is no electricity, internet, or modern conveniences. With the scaffolding of the old world gone, Mandel explores what humanity might prioritize in rebuilding after a catastrophe: art and community.
At the heart of the novel is the Traveling Symphony, a troupe of actors and musicians performing Shakespeare in the open air, as it was done during the plague-ridden days of the Bard himself. For these performers, Shakespeare represents the best of the old world. Five hundred years between plagues, his plays continued to be read and performed. As Kirsten, one of our actors in the Symphony reflects:
“What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a parking lot….”
I think of that image often: of Titania, Queen of the Fairies, aglow in candle light in an abandoned Walmart parking lot.
One of the novel’s most memorable symbols is emblazoned across the Traveling Symphony’s makeshift caravans of trucks pulled by horses: Survival is insufficient.
This phrase, borrowed from Star Trek, becomes the novel’s rallying cry.
Post-apocalyptic communities in Mandel’s novel find strength through making art and mutual aid. Survivors create informal networks of care and protection, reflecting an ideal of community that’s rooted in reciprocity rather than competition. The communities that thrive — such as the Traveling Symphony — are those that prioritize empathy and solidarity. Mandel suggests that in a better world, individuals must invest in relationships and build resilient communities through mutual support and collective care.
Some of Mandel’s characters find solace in a small regional airport in Michigan. There, Clark, a former corporate psychologist, transforms an abandoned terminal into the "Museum of Civilization." Where a lunch counter in an airport concourse once sold sandwiches, now visitors can examine relics like a motorcycle engine, a high-heeled shoe, an obsolete iPhone, or a snow globe — these beautiful vestiges of a once sprawling global supply chain. While in the museum, tending to the memories of world before the collapse, Clark observes that “time is reset by catastrophe.”
We find ourselves living again in time reset by catastrophe. Billionaires and fascist leaders continue to serve their own interests at the expense of democracy and the global climate. Every day as I scroll my social feeds that have become tools of empire and fascism. I see the faces of dead Palestinian children, as a genocide blazes on in Gaza, supported by the American government. The American people have elected someone I can only describe as a living nightmare. With our black mirrors in hand, we have front row seat to our own apocalypse.
I often feel utterly powerless. But I have to find within me something to hold onto, a small flame to stay alight. I need fuel to keep working. To offer my hands to my community. To do hard things. To stay alive, even if out of sheer spite.
It is necessary to remember that civilizations are tenuously held agreements.
We cannot count on our leaders to save us; often, we must brace for them to actively harm us. And yet, as Mandel’s novel insists, we the people must do more than just survive. We must persist with purpose, with beauty, with human connection.
Mandel's vision for rebuilding a world highlights that, even amid incalculable loss, humanity has the potential to construct something more meaningful and humane. Good literature — like Station Eleven — reminds us how to resist despair: by building new worlds. I hope my students find their hope. I hope you tend it like a small fire.