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Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe.
Miranda has learned to find peace in her own choices and circumstances, and this sense of acceptance applies even when she knows she’s going to die. With the virus spreading around her, she doesn’t desperately attempt to find safety or resent others for living when she cannot. Instead, she chooses to soak in her last moments of being alive in this beautiful world, enjoying the sun over the ocean. She finds hope in the knowledge that there will be people who survive the pandemic, even though it won’t be her. It is no wonder that Miranda’s art and literature become a source of wisdom and emotional respite for many of the survivors in the new world.
She started to explain her project to him again but the words stopped in her throat. “You don't have to understand it,” she said. “It's mine.”
Miranda often feels misunderstood or underestimated, especially by the men in her life. In this passage, her boyfriend, Pablo, doesn’t grasp what Miranda is trying to do with her Station Eleven comics. Miranda realizes that she doesn’t want or need to explain her art to him. After all, she makes this art solely for herself, with no real plans to distribute it to the public. This realization that she does not have to explain herself is the crux of Miranda’s character—she finds her worth, her identity, her strength, and her purpose from within herself, not from others.
She knows she’ll never belong here no matter how hard she tries. These are not her people. She is marooned on a strange planet.
Miranda feels very out of place with Arthur’s social circle and with being in the public eye. Miranda is an introverted person who is uninterested in fame or recognition. She doesn’t even want to publish her own art, the Station Eleven comics, which shows that her creations come solely from her personal need to express herself, not from a goal of being known or praised. This is not the case for Arthur and his friends—they all seek fame and recognition, which can be seen from their self-centered conversations. Their dinner party feels more like a networking event than a gathering of friends.
“This life was never ours,” she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. “We were only ever borrowing it.”
Miranda speaks these lines after her separation from Arthur, as she walks through the house she’ll soon move out of. She’s always known that she didn’t belong in Arthur’s world, and so it makes sense to her that she’s now being made to move on. However, Miranda’s words also reflect the state of humanity in Station Eleven. The pandemic proves that this “life” and this Earth do not belong to humans, nor do they revolve around them. We simply get to live here for a brief time, before we too must move on. While Miranda has no foresight of the flu, her reflections on her personal life often become communal wisdom for those living in the post-pandemic world.
I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.
This memorable line from Miranda’s Station Eleven comics becomes a crucial thesis of Station Eleven. Although Miranda writes the comic long before the pandemic, the narrative is one that people living in the post-flu world can profoundly relate to. In Miranda’s comic, Dr. Eleven, living a lonely life in his space station, longs to return to his home on Earth. In the post-pandemic world, many survivors long for the old world they once knew, which was full of cities, people, art, and action. The new world has its own beauties, but it is lonely and harsh. Miranda’s lyrical description of astronautical homesickness resonates with the survivors who are homesick for a world they will never get back.
