Emily St. John Mandel: recommendation

Transcript context

…There’s an idea you mention in Glass Hotel that if your time left in freedom is limited — perceived as limited — that you might seek to do things to make time slow down. What would you do, for you, to make time slow down? I would travel. It’s interesting — during periods when I’m traveling a lot . . . I’ve done a lot of lectures over the past few years for Station Eleven. The months when I’m out on the road, like every week for a couple of days, or every 10 days — those months are so unbelievably long. And I’ll have these moments of, not quite panic, but thinking, “Oh my God.” My friend emailed me two weeks ago, and I never got back to her. I’ll go back to the email, and the email came in four days ago. It’s just that time has been incredibly extended. My feeling is that the way to slow down time is to have a lot of experiences, to see different places, to meet new people. That makes every day feel longer. It’s interesting, I got a glimpse of the flip side of this a few years ago. I was in a festival with Kay Ryan, the American poet, and we were talking about this phenomenon. She’s done some work in the prison system, teaching inmates how to write or running writing workshops, and she talked about women in prison practicing this opposite strategy of trying to make every day as similar as possible in order for time to speed up. It’s just the days run together in that rhythm. Yeah, I think the way to slow down time is to have a lot of experiences. You mention prison. In The Glass Hotel, you mentioned the idea that perhaps everyone in prison is depressed, but of course that’s a third person reporting. Do you agree? Do you think everyone in prison is depressed?…

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