An expanded universe
Ft. Emily St. John Mandel, Heather O'Neill, Eden Robinson and me
I went on a walk today and thought about Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel and my Saturn Return. I had been listening to Canadian astrologer Chani Nicholas’s new course about the Saturn Return, an astrology transit that happens to everyone roughly between ages 27 to 31, then again around 56 to 60 and 84 to 90. It’s known as one of the hardest transits, as it’s the “grow up and get your shit together” transit.
I technically finished my Saturn Return in May. But I wanted to reflect more upon the last two years of my life, so I decided to listen to the course on an impromptu walk that I decided to take while working on this newsletter.
My process for writing is one where I dump a bunch of things onto a document or a piece of paper, leave it for a bit, return, then discard most of it. And that’s when I can truly start writing. My unvarnished thoughts aren’t as cute or as interesting after leaving them for 75 minutes. Most have a short shelf life, but a few always intrigue me when I come back.
The thought that continued to intrigue me from this dump — and followed me on my walk — was an offhand remark about the beauty of Sea of Tranquility. I read Emily St. John Mandel’s science fiction novel in the summer of 2022, just a few months after it came out. I can barely remember what happened in the book, and remember finding it hard to describe even then. But I remembered the feeling of it, how it expanded my universe. The book is a feeling more than a plot. It goes back and forth between different people and timelines and wormholes and it doesn’t totally make sense. Well, it doesn’t make sense, yet it makes perfect emotional sense.
While I was on my walk, I sat down on a wall made out of rocks around someone’s garden, trying to parse out the lesson of my Saturn Return by reading things about it on Chani Nicholas’s astrology app. As I turned my head to get up, I noticed a cute, wooden Little Free Library up the road, with a man and woman in front of it, looking at the books. I had never walked up that street. But I decided to go and check it out.
When I got there, I saw that the woman held The Glass Hotel — another Emily St. John Mandel book (whose characters return in Sea of Tranquility)!
“Oh my God!” I screamed, and jumped a bit. “I was just thinking about Emily St. John Mandel! The author! Of the book you’re holding!”
“It’s like you manifested it!” the woman responded in an equally enthusiastic tone. It was the perfect response to my annoying little witch self.
I ended up having a lovely conversation with her and her partner, and I hope I see them around again soon. I also hope she likes the book (though I didn’t love The Glass Hotel as much as Sea of Tranquility).
This encounter was so much like the strange ones that often happen in Sea of Tranquility, that seem so meaningless, so small, yet so, so destined and purposeful. This encounter also had a similar magical feel to another Canadian novel that I had read recently, Heather O’Neill’s The Capital of Dreams. This book is a fairy tale and follows a young girl in a fictional war-torn country, where she ends up having to survive in the forest with the company of a talking goose. I didn’t always understand everything in the book, but the emotions and imagery invaded my consciousness in a beautiful way, so that I didn’t mind (though there were parts of the book that clearly told you what to think about things like misogyny; O’Neill is against it, in case you were wondering).
After ambling around a cemetery and getting lost trying to find a bathroom in a church, I arrived home and searched up Emily St. John Mandel online. I found a New York Times Book Review interview with her, where she mentioned that one of her favourite books is fellow Canadian Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach — a book I had coincidentally just finished last month. I agree that it’s fantastic and everyone should read it because it has that same mystical quality that I loved in Sea of Tranquility and The Capital of Dreams: I didn’t rationally understand parts of it, yet those bits remain in my bones.