Miranda Colbert says “this life was never ours. We were only ever borrowing it” (101). What makes someone’s life his or her own?
Miranda Colbert says “this life was never ours. We were only ever borrowing it” (101). What makes someone’s life his or her own?
It’s the lifestyle that the person wants to live in comfortably that make someone’s life his/her own.
An individual won’t claim that living a life that’s tiring, oppressive, and/or unfitting to his/her character is the life that truly belongs to the individual. That individual would feel uncomfortable, observed, and expected to go with the flow and live the life that doesn’t appeal to the individual. He/she might choose to live that way for financial or societal reasons, against his/her real wants/wishes.
In Miranda’s case, living a flamboyant, celebrity-status lifestyle with Arthur isn’t her way of wanting to live her life. She knows that she won’t and can’t fit into the lifestyle Arthur is living in because the lifestyle doesn’t reflect who she is, despite the fact that she loves Arthur. The lifestyle was more appealing to Arthur, who fit in the Hollywood society perfectly. Miranda chose to live with Arthur and consequently the lifestyle that goes with it. Because of her love of Arthur, she only wanted to spend time with him before he moved on, thus explaining the “borrowing of life” part. Miranda knew that her new lifestyle wasn’t going to last after Arthur became more famous.
The same reasoning goes with her life with Pablo, whom she feels is a “deadweight” in her life. Pablo lived his life waiting for the next big opportunity and was always suspicious of Miranda’s public sphere. Miranda never wanted to live that lifestyle permanently and yearned to live the way she wants to live. She wanted to live with Pablo because she felt that he was a successful painter who loved her. Miranda’s desire to live the way she wants to resulted in her breakup with Pablo and her divorce with Arthur.
Miranda never wanted to live in those lifestyles permanently, she just wanted to live with the person, not his lifestyle.
By living on her own, away from Arthur and Pablo, Miranda is now more at ease because she is living her life the way she wants to. She feels most comfortable working with Neptune Logistics and creating new ideas for her comic book and likes to work in a both organized and creative environment. This individualistic way of living seem to make Miranda enjoy her new lifestyle, although it may not necessarily appeal to Arthur or Pablo, both of whom lead very different lifestyles compared to the lifestyle of Miranda.
Like all individuals, living a life that is tailored to that person’s wants/needs leads to a belief that the life he/she is living is his/her own life.
If you are left in the wilderness as an infant, you would die. As a young child, one needs a home, food, and the other necessities of growing up, otherwise, one will not survive. Therefore, you become who you are, and your life becomes what it is through what your parents and society teach you and show you through childhood experiences. You immediately are in debt to them, and your life immediately becomes shared. If one lived in solitude his/her entire life, then yes, it would be completely yours. But as we are social creatures, all of our lives are being shared and affect each other. Everyone is borrowing from other people, every day.
It seems to me, that every single one of us here, in college, is attempting to craft a life of our own. That’s the goal isn’t it? To make our own decisions, be in control of our own futures, and become the people we desire to be. In order to create a life of one’s own, I believe that it is a matter of taking responsibility for our actions, and acting in accordance with our own principles.
When Miranda says, “This life was never ours. We were only ever borrowing it” (100), she does so from the perspective of someone who allowed herself to be pulled along with the tides of Arthur’s life. Leading up to this quote is the dinner scene in which the reader can see just how out of place Miranda is, and how little effort she uses to claim her life with Arthur. “I wish you’d try a little harder,’ Arthur has said to her once or twice, but 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. The best she can do is pretend to be unflappable when she isn’t” (92). Merely getting by, pretending, playing a role in her life is certainly not living it. She is a passive character who allows her husband to make the decisions and talk for her. When Miranda is asked about her job or the story of how she and Arthur met, Arthur responds immediately, tailoring the information to best fit the image he has worked to create. He is living his own life. He is an active participant in it, present in the moment, making his own decisions, crafting his own life. Though, this life might not turn out to be ideal in the end, it is at least his own life, and he only has himself to blame for the way it turned out.
Above, it was stated that one cannot live their own life unless they are entirely solitary. While I think there are certainly many merits to this belief, I think that people can actively choose to have their lives intertwine, and still be living their own life. Let’s say two people meet. If they both make their own personal decision to befriend the other, than they are both actively participating in, and forging their own lives. Their individual lives then become a shared story, but they are still separate beings with personal actions, desires, and responsibilities. In Miranda and Arthur’s case, Miranda was no longer an active participant in her own life. She let herself be overshadowed by Arthur and their story became his story for all intents and purposes.
Living a life of your own is all about being the lead character in your own life. This doesn’t mean you have to be an egocentric person, simply that you have to make decisions for yourself in order to craft the life that you want to live. If 100 years from now you look back on your life with and can take responsibility for the actions that molded your life, even if they involved other people. Then I believe you can say that you lived a life of your own.
Living a life on your own means that you are not tied to someone else. When Miranda is saying this, she is referring to how she is tied to Arthur, and how she and he are intertwined. At that point, she is not living a life of her own, because Arthur is dominating and dictating the relationship. She is living off of his earnings, and at the end of the day, when he ends it, she cannot continue doing what she is doing–she has to change.
Miranda is on her own when she is back working at her old company. Here, while she is reliant on her company, she is not reliant or subservient to any person.
This is not to say that someone cannot have a partner and live a life of their own. Compromising can still be “living your own life.” It is only when the relationship is unbalanced that a person is not living their own life.
When Miranda claims to have only been borrowing her life with Arthur, she implies that she has not been herself (101). In that relationship, she was required to play along with societal expectations for the sake of Arthur’s career. She had to dress a certain way, get used to paparazzi, and entertain guests with whom she had nothing in common. The only time she felt at peace was when she was in her studio, privately working on her project. However, once she ended said “borrowed life,” she began to live the life meant for her. It is one where “the moments of emptiness and disappointment are minimal, where by her mid thirties she feels competent and at last more or less at ease with the world, studying foreign languages in first-class lounges and traveling in comfortable seats across oceans, meeting with clients and living her job, breathing her job, until she isn’t sure where she stops and her job begins” (107). She almost always loves her life, and she loves her job so much it hardly seems like work. Now, she owns her life. It is the way she wants it, not something that others have chosen for her.
The thought of not living your own life is a scary one. I , as well as most people, desire to live an authentic and honest life. This essentially means speaking your mind, standing up for yourself, and actually experiencing your life. This sounds simple and obvious, but is probably easier said than done. Are any thoughts entirely original? Is it possible to know? The thought that I am currently thinking could’ve been thought a trillion times before. Are my actions really coming from an honest place? Or are they influenced by my family, friends, and what I’ve been taught?
In “Station Eleven”, Miranda says “this life was never ours, we were only every borrowing it” because she was living a life that wasn’t hers. She was living vicariously through Arthur–going to his parties, hanging out with his friends, attending his performances. Her only outlet to express herself was through her art in her comic books. I think that living a life of your own is a central theme in the book and that this theme is centered around the comic books. The comic books are important in the beginning of the novel when they are given to Kirsten and are ultimately what tie the two time periods (pre-world and post-world) together at the end of the book. The prophet ending up with the comic book surprised me a lot.
Living a life of your own also means doing what’s right for you and only you. Elizabeth and Arthur’s son Tyler left the Museum of Civilization to become the prophet and lead a group of religious followers. Although this cult-like group was dangerous and I myself wouldn’t have joined if I was a character in the book, I can admire Tyler’s ambition and ability to leave the museum. I have found that it is easier to stay than to leave in most situations because leaving is bound to disappoint and/or sadden someone. Despite this, leaving, whether it be leaving a group or a place, can be liberating and a way to live your own life.
When Mirando refers to “borrowing” this lifestyle, I think that she is referring to something that she wanted to try out and experience, and yet is not the life for her. This artificial life with Arthur, the parties, the paparazzi — they might have looked intriguing at one point, but they are not the appropriate life for her. She is an artist, someone who likes to sketch and work in solitude. She was, in a sense, “borrowing” this time of her life from Arthur and the people around her, but eventually she needed to “give it back” it and begin to be in charge of her own life again.
However, while I understand this quote in context with the story and I find it very poetic, I think that one’s life is ALWAYS one’s own. You are always present in your body, living your experiences. Just because you feel trapped or not in control of your own life does not mean that it ceases to be your own. Even a life that you don’t like is yours, and we have to remember that this is our life, passing always in the present as “now.”
To own one’s life is difficult to describe, but there are certain properties that clearly indicate that a person’s life is their own.
For a person’s life to be their own, the person must feel a sense of belonging, which their existence is in a certain way complete in their environment. An example of this belonging can be seen early in Miranda’s life while working at her secretary job, where she used her vast amount of free time to further her work on her comic book series “Station Eleven”, a project that gave her a purpose.
For a person’s life to be their own, the person must feel as if they fit within the life itself, similar to those around them. If a person feels that they do not fit within their life, they may see such an existence as incorrect for them, as if for someone else. Miranda knows such a disjointed existence during her anniversary, as she feels unkempt and imperfect in comparison to her husband’s friends in the Hollywood community, including Elizabeth, who later takes her place or life as Arthur Leander’s wife.
For a person’s life to be their own, the person must feel a sense of control, having the ability to choose how they act through their own desires. After her marriage to Arthur Leander ended Miranda pursued a career in shipping, climbing the corporate ladder until she became a professional traveler, seeing the world while continuing her work on her near life-long project “Station Eleven”. By traveling the world she begins to control her life in ways she never had before, acting as she wished and feeling confident in her appearance and her existence in general.
Prior to the Georgia Flu’s arrival, few of our main characters were truly living a life of their own. Miranda, Jeevan, and Arthur, at one point or another in their lives, found themselves struggling to, ‘craft the lives they wanted to live’ as Isabelle Sackville-West put it. Miranda “borrowed” her dreams of a happily-ever-after with glamorous, capricious Arthur instead of . Jeevan merely survived for years as a paparazzo. He made it his job to be concerned with the lives of others and neglected exploring his passions. At the end of his life, Arthur found himself trapped on stage, forever a king. Meanwhile, his ghost’s heart ached to be a responsible father and a wholehearted companion.
After the Georgia Flu, the luxury of time is lost. No longer can people lose themselves in the concerns and needs of others. Struggle for survival of body and spirit requires nothing but full investment in ones own needs and desires. The sheer obsession with celebrities and their personal lives shows just how distracted the general population is. Maybe, because people find they don’t living the lives they hoped for, they escape into glamorous and “successful” lives of celebrities—vicarious living for the millions stifling disappointment or boredom.
In year fifteen we find Kirsten thoroughly interested with the brief existence of Arthur Leander. She collects magazine clippings of him, frequently reviews her memories to feel his presence, reads his book. Unlike the other characters, Kirsten clutches onto Arthur’s memory because she knows he is somehow a part of her past, a part of her. Somehow he has come to be the most concrete puzzle piece she has to her early years. And of course, wondering about Arthur’s existence provides Kirsten an excellent distraction from her current circumstance.
(let’s stretch)
Miranda’s quote can also be applied to the novel and world. In the end of ends, we “borrow” our lives from Earth. As long as she harbors us without a Georgia Flu or natural disaster, we can continue to waste our lives or make the most of them. One could interpret her quote as ominous foreshadowing. Poor Miranda is freed from Arthur’s shadow only to find the life she built for herself snatched away.
By saying “this life was never ours. We were only ever borrowing it,” Miranda is addressing both the nature of Arthur’s source of joy and employment as well as her relation to it. In the beginning of his career, Arthur had poor acting skills but worked hard to hone his craft and establish a place in Hollywood for himself because he wanted, more than anything, to leave his small hometown. Arthur’s life does not belong solely to himself because he relies on the admiration and opportunities that other people offer him in order to feel whole and he cannot control the reactions of others. Miranda does not own her life because her identity has become intertwined with that of her famous husband.
An individual owns his or her life through finding fulfillment in an activity or practice that they can completely immerse themselves in. Work they become so involved in that even the cacophony of their conflicts and concerns fade to silence. Miranda found that while writing and illustrating her comic books she could feel at peace and confident in her abilities. While it is fine and natural for people to find pleasure in interactions with others, it is also important for one to establish a passion that is intrinsically fascinating and satisfying
Miranda’s perception that “this life was never ours,” was such a poignant notion to me. The author paints a picture of Miranda as a young woman who suffers abuse (both physically and psychologically) from men, yet she remains submissive and passive. In the role of Arthur’s wife and Pablo’s boyfriend she is “borrowing” because she simply goes through each day without any passion for her place as a wife/girlfriend. She notes Pablo’s beliefs on “machines” and “the Man” but doesn’t seem to respect or agree with these ideas, she just passively observes them. Furthermore she doesn’t share Pablo’s goals or outlooks on life. Similarly, she finds herself out of place amidst Arthur’s world. She is not at home among glamour and publicity; the one place Miranda does find herself at ease is while working for Neptune Logistics. At work she has control and a sense of purpose. Miranda in her work space and Miranda at home with Arthur and Pablo creates a juxtaposition of her two different lives. The life that was her own was clearly the life in which she was not subject to the beliefs or lifestyles of what seemed to be a higher power (in Arthur and Pablo), but instead gave her the opportunity to express her passion.
I also find it interesting that Miranda is a comic book artist and writer. In this sense, she creates life. She repeatedly reflects on how her creation of Station Eleven incorporates elements of her life, yet she is able to shape the life within her comic in whichever way she desires. Gaining a sense of control over her life is a step towards fulfillment for Miranda. This becomes even more apparent as she states at her anniversary dinner party (p 95) that the importance of her writing lies in the fact that it makes her happy, and there is no significance in other people viewing it, it is just her own.
Furthermore, I felt that the author could have been suggesting that Pablo’s beliefs and Arthur’s lifestyle are elements that seem to pervade throughout society and influence us to believe we need to live our lives in a particular way. Because of that, we may need to dig a little deeper and find what we really believe and are passionate about to live for a bigger reason and make our life our own.
Miranda’s discomfort in a lifestyle of extravagance and fame is well summarized by her statement that she was “only ever borrowing it” (101) in order to follow Arthur. Her ability to recognize that she is out of place in such a lifestyle proves her advantage over other few characters in the novel who take much longer to acknowledge their dissatisfaction of the life they live. Aside from this fact, Miranda’s devotion to creating a life of her own makes her a unique and crucially divergent character. Her daily ritual of repeating “‘I repent nothing'” (107) to herself in a mirror – even while she lived with Arthur in Los Angeles – allowed her the freedom to learn from any “mistakes” or unpleasant times in her life and therefore push herself to strive for better. By living a life with no regrets, Miranda was able to live a life of her own.
When she divorced Arthur (simultaneously ending her last serious, romantic relationship), she allowed herself to thoughtfully examine her life, and choose the occupation which had made her the happiest: returning to not only her desk job but also her artful series of graphic novels. As an independent women with her own career, a hobby she was passionate about, and no regrets, she is able to live “a life that feels like freedom” (107). At that point in her life, Miranda’s life is completely her own. Her ownership is not solely because of the fact that she is single, but rather due to the fact that being single is what made her happiest and feel the most freedom.
For others, like Arthur, full ownership was never achieved in their lifetime. In the last few hours of his life, Arthur has time to reflect on the decisions he had made in his lifetime and the people who had great influence. He comes to the unfortunate realization that “he was a man that repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light” (327). Arthur’s life is not his own because he allows it to be dictated by the materialistic demands and expectations of society rather than his own desires and goals. His lack of passion or commitment (reflected in his romantic life) calloused him into a man with many regrets.
One must take action if he ever hopes to have his own identity. To know that one is responsible for his own choices makes someone’s life his own. If I only take responsibility for my good choices and blame everyone but myself for my bad choices, I am an arrogant fool who reacts selfishly. By only taking responsibility for my good choices, my arrogance would blind me from seeing all sides of an issue. Conversely, if I only take responsibility for my bad choices and not my good choices, I am a pessimist with low self esteem. I would be a slave to my own self doubt. To take control of one’s life, one must find the balance between taking responsibility and giving it to others.
Hey guys! I know I’m a little late to the commenting party, but better late than never, right?
This quote from Station Eleven is one that really struck a chord with me, perhaps because it’s something I had been been contemplating prior to even opening the book. As an out-of-state student from Iowa, I spent a lot of my time prior to IntroDUCKtion relentlessly worrying about trying to forge a life in an entirely new environment. Would it even be possible for me to build a life that is truly mine here, or would I merely be borrowing a life in order to survive my surroundings?
I won’t bore you with the details considering you all know what a wonderfully welcoming place Eugene is, but I found that I genuinely felt at home here. However, I believe having a life that is my own will take much more than just getting settled in. Much more, actually. Building a life that is one’s own requires diligent and persistent effort towards acknowledging what is important to you and how those aspirations can be translated into reality. I’m thrilled at the prospect of exploring my passions and taking a shot at discovering exactly who Sadie Kavalier is, and I’m even more excited that Eugene is where that will happen.
But back to the book. While I do relate with Miranda in that she felt out of place geographically, she entered into an entirely different social realm than that to which she was accustomed. So many aspects of our lives are impacted by the company we keep, and lack of a supportive and at least somewhat like-minded social network can lead to devastating feelings of isolation. On top of this, Miranda was pressured into living a publicized lifestyle that was a far cry from the private artistic environment she preferred.
Simply escaping this environment was not nearly enough for Miranda to regain ownership of her life, however. Fortunately she realized this and vigorously pushed herself back into a lifestyle that made her comfortable. Without this self-awareness, she could have remained lost emotionally and repeatedly “borrowed lives” as if trying on different costumes, in the hopes of eventually finding one that fit.
Miranda did not have an existence outside of Arthur’s. While Miranda did not have any sort of social life outside of Arthur’s friends in the movie industry, she was able to make some sort of meaning for herself, however small, through her art. Miranda drew the world of Dr. Eleven, where she was able to escape. Throughout her life she was able to continue working on Dr. Eleven in an effort to not lose herself. She finally got a life that was not just someone else’s when she divorced Arthur and returned to her job at Neptune Logistics.
Someone’s life becomes their own when they feel they belong, and are where they are because of their own doing. While one’s life is influenced by those around them, that does not mean one’s life has to be completely defined by others. As individuals the things which make us different, or which we believe are important, allow us to continue to make our lives our own, and not become defined by others.
I think what Miranda meant when she said they were “only ever borrowing it” (101) was that the life they were living was temporary and not where they would ultimately end up. Miranda understood that the glamorous life she was living with Arthur would vanish. She was merely there because that was where Arthur wanted to be. Once her relationship with Arthur disintegrated, there was nothing left for her in LA. Also it was not a lifestyle she belonged in, and she always seemed uncomfortable.
The idea of borrowing a life seems odd because most of us would like to assume that we are living our own lives. However, I think we are borrowing lives more often than we think. To me, borrowing a life means that you are living a life that you don’t feel like you belong in. Borrowing a life involves putting on a persona to fit in to your surroundings. Alternatively, a life that is your own is when you are able to be authentic and comfortable in your environment.
Somebody’s life is their own only when they begin taking charge of it. We may be taught we can “take charge” of our own future, but in the end, actions do speak louder than words. By making changes to make ourselves happier and make lifestyle changes to make ourselves independent from others, only when we really take charge of life, as one only begins living life when you are the person who wants or makes the change to create an individual path that creates or represents your creativity and happiness.
I think Miranda’s intent in saying, “this life was never ours. We were only ever borrowing it” (101) is that when you don’t take control of your life and live it to the fullest, you aren’t owning it, you’re only borrowing it. You only own your live, when you are doing the things you want to do, and doing what you believe is getting the most out of life. Miranda is “borrowing” this life, because being Arthur’s wife and not working isn’t what she believes is living her life to its greatest extent. To make her life her own she had to make changes, and take control of her life.