the waiting,” Clark had heard a woman say, “I can’t take the waiting, I have to do something, even if it’s just walking to the nearest town to see what’s going on.…”

These taken-for-granted miracles that had persisted all around

Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin.

The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.

wasn’t delight in his voice, not exactly. It was importance. This was a man who liked to know things that other people didn’t.

The memory had dimmed since she’d last retrieved it, imprecision creeping in. She no longer remembered the name of the poet or anything else about the conversation.

We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations

not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? He wished

probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”