Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel

I’m doing voice to text on this because I’m walking and it’s fucking raining so who knows how clear any of this will turn out when I come to edit it and publish it at some point at a later date…

I read this book almost 2 weeks ago now, it was a Christmas gift from my partner and I enjoyed it a lot erreucck erreuuccckkk I just coughed twice, yes, the reason why I didn’t get around to making a post about it earlier than now is because I have been I think the sickest I’ve ever been in my life, i.e. the most unwell, rather than the most “skater” cool …

cool …

I honestly thought I was dying for some time, for some moments.

I’ve never felt like that before.

I spent time over Christmas and New Years with some children and the rumour one hears from peers with children that they are close to biological weapons with their petri-dish-ional ability to spread and metamorphise hyperpotent variants of the common cold and influenza is something I’d never really experienced first hand, however, it seems like the clammy skeletal hand of child metastised illness finally came for me…

…

I was more ill with whatever this cold/flu bug was than I felt when I had COVID (remember that?) a few years ago…

… that time I could still walk, and think – I couldn’t physically talk as my throat was too constricted for that, and there have been a couple of other occasions when I’ve lost my voice, but this time I was unable to move, and filled with an unrelenting dread that the hour of my departure from this cruel world was at hand…

However, what was different was that this fear of death was a fear rather than an opportunity…

I felt like, maybe, that it might be bad to die????

I hadn’t written this blog about Emily St. John Mandel’s book The Sea of Tranquillity!

I hadn’t managed to… errr… create a life in which I enjoy myself??

I didn’t manage to… I don’t know… What else didn’t I do?

I didn’t… do or achieve many achievable things that I wanted to or needed to do, and that feeling wasn’t material that filled me with a sense of resignation to an imminent disease-based death, but it was instead… was instead… was instead… was instead… or… worry… or an an an an an an

it made me want to live???

Is this how “normal” people feel, when confronted with death?

When confronted with a fear of their mortality? Not relief, at the cessation of pained reality, not a final freeing from the unpleasant mediocre foreverness of life, but a grasping, clasping, juvenile (?) and naive sense that maybe some life remains yet to be lived????

I don’t know!

A few days ago, I read a news story about a polar bear dying of bird flu, and this weighed on my mind while I lay sick and unable to move or function…

if bird flu can kill a bear, I cried weeping to my lover, then surely the flu can kill me?

Me?

Me?

If the flu can kill a bear, then surely it can kill me?

I am not a strong as a bear, so I am more vulnerable.

I am not as strong as a bear.

It didn’t kill me.

It didn’t kill me.

That’s a near depth experience, I think…

I think I will consider this a near death experience…

This is the closest I’ve ever been to death, unless you count like being in an aeroplane when technically every second you are a second away from an industrial failure causing immediate death… Or a car or a train or whatever.

NDE. Near Death Experience. Hashtag NDE. NDE for the BDP.

Do I feel changed, purified, elevated by my #NDE?

Not really, no.

Is this a good feeling to have at the start of a New Year? Maybe? Maybe it is?

I’m not even as strong as a bear…

–///–

Sea of Tranquillity is a super neat, tight, mainstream time travel novella (or short novel?), that also has Matrix-y elements around the potential for life being a simulation.

It’s super well-constructed, super entertaining, and I enjoyed it a lot – would read something else by the writer if it turned up in my hands.

Nothing else on the novel, no.

I must live, now I am not dead!

Thanks, bye!