{"id":1774,"date":"2017-05-08T16:39:46","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T20:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/?p=1774"},"modified":"2017-05-10T16:41:18","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T20:41:18","slug":"repair-and-destruction-in-station-eleven-27-47","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/2017\/05\/08\/repair-and-destruction-in-station-eleven-27-47\/","title":{"rendered":"Repair and Destruction in Station Eleven (27-47)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cThere is a crack in everything. That\u2019s how the light gets in.\u201d Leonard Cohen, Anthem<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Repair and destruction operate as the main themes of\u00a0Station Eleven.\u00a0<\/em>From the destruction and reuse of old buildings to the figurative death and rebirth of the characters, repair and destruction offer a new look at Steven J. Jackson’s “Rethinking Repair.”<\/p>\n

Jackson’s article mainly focuses on the destruction and reparation of material objects with an emphasis on the qualities of innovation, knowledge\/power, and the ethics of care. This post will take those qualities and apply\u00a0them to two\u00a0characters, Miranda and Arthur, in order to grasp a deeper meaning behind them.<\/p>\n

Death is not the same everyplace, everywhere, and for everyone. Everybody dies but not all in the same way. Some people die while they are still alive<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Miranda: Rebirth<\/strong><\/h1>\n
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Repair <\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\u00a0“She saw ghosts of herself everywhere here. A twenty-three-year-old Miranda with the wrong clothiers and her hair sticking up, washing her hands and peering anxiously at herself in the ladies’ room mirror; a twenty-seven-year-old recently divorced Miranda slouching across the lobby with her sunglasses in place, wishing she could disappear, in tears because she’d seen herself on a gossip website that morning and the headline was agonising: IS ARTHUR SECRETLY CALLING MIRANDA? (Answer: no.) (Mandel,\u00a0205)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Miranda was a living Spector. She hid away in her cartoons and\u00a0Station Eleven<\/em> with little regard to her life, her happiness, and her aspirations. Miranda had a rough beginning with the abusive and clingy Pablo, but\u00a0her life became marginally better once she met Arthur. Her promising romance with Arthur, unfortunately, ended in the most bitter way possible. Miranda hit the lowest point in her life at the anniversary dinner party where Arthur and his mistress were openly flirting and blatantly ignoring her presence. Jeevan’s\u00a0picture of Miranda in her sunglasses and dangling cigarette at four in the morning helped memorialise the worst moment in her entire life.<\/p>\n

Although Miranda was dealt all of these hardships, she managed to find her way out of it. After the divorce, Miranda took her career even more seriously and devoted her life to her job, cartoons, and\u00a0Station Eleven.<\/em> She blossomed into a motivated and dedicated worker, had a dramatic makeover, and lived a busy life of travel, creativity, and success. She embraced the quality of innovation by finding new ways to approach her life and take care of herself. This sense of innovation allowed her to cultivate and entirely new and beneficial lifestyle. Before the Georgian Flu took her life, Miranda was able to become the person she was always meant to be. She had shed her previous life, come to terms with it, and was moving on to greater things. She underwent a\u00a0rebirth forever leaving the old Miranda behind. Once Miranda began to take care of\u00a0herself, she achieved wonderful things.<\/p>\n

As Jackson points out, “To care for something (an animal, a child, a sick relative, or a technological system) is to bear and affirm a moral relation to\u00a0it. . . Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often sustain it,” (Jackson 231).<\/p>\n

When Miranda learned to value herself and take care of her needs, aspirations, and desires, she learned how to become a stronger person. Instead of hiding away in the shadows, she asserted her own identity and power and was willing to face any challenge that the world offered.<\/p>\n

Arthur: Death<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Destruction<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“It was disappointment, it seemed to her, that had settled over his face, and there was a strained quality about his eyes that she didn’t remember having seen before.” (Mandel, 209)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Arthur, on the other hand, never found the same piece of mind that Miranda did. Instead, Arthur’s light went out while he was still breathing. The young, vibrant, and eager young man had turned into a perpetual performer, a shell of his former self. Disappointment was rampant in his life and led to his multiple divorces, lack of friends, and other stressors in his life.<\/p>\n

“Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life? The man playing the part of the ageing actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy.” (211)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This unhappiness stems from Arthur losing himself. The spirit that once led him to success had been crushed by the overwhelming life of fame. The death of his soul, of the young spirit that led Arthur to greatness, deterred Arthur from finding true happiness.<\/p>\n

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“Back then, back at the beginning. I was so struck by him. I don’t mean romantically, it was nothing like that. Sometimes you just\u00a0meet\u00a0<\/em>someone. He was so kind, that’s what I remember most clearly. Kind to everyone he met. This humility about him.” (222)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By the end of Arthur’s life, he had lost the compassion, empathy, and genuine qualities that propelled him forward in the first place. Arthur either used up, neglected, or purposefully stomped out any remainder of this spirit and became miserable as a result. There was no more innovation, no sense of repair; there was merely a spiral into destruction.<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Jackson, Steven J. “Welcome!”\u00a0Steven J. Jackson, Cornell University<\/i>. MIT, n.d. Web.<\/p>\n

Mandel, Emily St. John.\u00a0Station Eleven<\/i>. Toronto: Harpercollins Canada, 2017. Print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere is a crack in everything. That\u2019s how the light gets in.\u201d Leonard Cohen, Anthem Repair and destruction operate as the main themes of\u00a0Station Eleven.\u00a0From the destruction and reuse of old buildings to the figurative death and rebirth of the characters, repair and destruction offer a new look at Steven J. Jackson’s “Rethinking Repair.” Jackson’s … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Repair and Destruction in Station Eleven (27-47)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-b"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1774"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1781,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774\/revisions\/1781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}