When we are grieving, is it a good idea or a bad idea to engage with art that takes grief to be its subject? Does this help us to cope, or does it rip out whatever stitches we have managed to sew in while we try to bear an unbearable loss?

I recently read Emily St. John Mandel'sStation Eleven, and then watched the HBO mini-series adaptation. Josh and I were planning to talk about the TV version on this year’s “Dionysus Awards,” but there were so many amazing films to talk about that we just didn't have time to fit it in.

Both the novel and the series are about disease, death, and dread, and mourning on a global scale. Exactly what we all want more of right now! So why did I love them so much, even though they offer up situations that are painful to imagine?

Mandel'sStation Eleven是关于艺术，和悲伤，以及两者之间如何对抗。故事情节涉及一场几乎终结了我们当代文明的流行病;20年后，有些人活了下来。但再也没有TikTok，再也没有微波炉爆米花，再也没有青霉素。我们跟随一群人物，从一个城镇到另一个城镇，把莎士比亚带到受创伤的幸存者那里，以及一本神秘的图画小说的来生，许多人觉得它鼓舞人心，实际上几乎是神秘的。

The novel wrestles with what I would call cultural grief: how do we, how can we, mourn a culture that is gone? By conjuring up a world in which our world has abruptly died, Mandel helps us see what is vital about our world, and what is trivial, what we should hold close and what we should stop valuing. The grief of the survivors provokes us to make decisions about what is truly valuable about the life we are still living, both individually and collectively.

这部迷你剧也做到了这一点，令人印象深刻。但这部迷你剧的伟大之处在于它的自我反思:它是一件艺术作品，推动我们反思艺术作品的力量，艺术作品可能会帮助我们在作为人类不可避免的损失中生存下来的力量。

There's a gorgeous scene in Episode 2 where the protagonist performs a monologue fromHamlet, Act 1, Scene 2. The brilliant performance by Mackenzie Davis as Kirsten, as well as the masterful flashbacks to an earlier traumatic moment in Kirsten’s life, offer an image of productiverepetition: maybe art can allow us to relive a horror, and the reliving of that horror gives us some reckoning, some loosening of the grip of trauma; a repetition that—although backward-looking, to a younger self, to a play written in 1604—allows us to have the courage to look forward.