#lit.

— how do you expect me to not gravitate towards you?

"Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”

By Keaton St. James (@/boykeats)

i thought it would make for an interesting reading experiment, taking two famous 'pandemic' novels one after the other, published over 60 years apart, to see how they compared. for one thing, i really enjoyed how station eleven was largely built around the before and after of the virus, while the plague was much more in the monotonous day-to-day of life alongside the disease. despite both books looking at the nature of people in the face something terrible, in both cases a deadly illness, they're both also such different worlds and have such different things to say about it. funnily enough, we do get travelling companies of actors in both books! though, one is a shakespearean company very much on the move, whereas the other is operatic and firmly stranded in disease territory. i do find it striking that both books see the untimely death of an actor on-stage; i don't know if this was intentional on emily st. john mandel's part, a kind of call-back to camus's novel, but either way, it makes for a haunting little echo.

🎨: @𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐫𝐛𝐲𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞

~ Zora Neale Hurston