Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows.

I have worn away a nib in narrating the day’s excitements. It is grown too dark to see.

Vyvyan spurns praise, both giving and receiving it. He says, ‘If people praise you, you’re not walking your own path.’

Best news of all: started composing on my own account again.

First Todtenvogel Mystified Stop Second Performance Fisticuffs Stop Third Adored Stop Fourth Talk of Town Stop.

farmers are worried about the harvest, but show me a placid farmer and I’ll show you a sane conductor.

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.

My posturing convinced no one, my poetry was ‘so vacuous it isn’t even bad’—so said Lawrence Ferlinghetti—and

Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”

Second: the discipline to nurture these gifts to maturity, for though humanity’s topsoil is fertile with talent, only one seed in ten thousand will ever flower—for want of discipline.”

I refought old arguments, then fought arguments that have never even existed.

You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world’s.

These…xistential qualms you suffer, they just mean you’re truly human.” I asked how I might remedy them. “You don’t remedy them. You live thru them.”

They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself.

I made it to Boxing Day because I was too miserable to hang myself. I lie. I made it to Boxing Day because I was too cowardly to hang myself.

We cut a pack of cards called historical context—our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks, and queens. Adrian’s cut threes, fours, and fives. That’s all.

My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.”

The stakes rose like inflation in Germany, but I am constitutionally unable to fold under pressure:—I dig in.

until the dance music collapsed and the hallway and stairs were packed with shocked revelers. Only the trombonist played on. That’s trombonists for you.

In youth, one’s heart plays più fortissimo than the head.

Was sorry to see him go. Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.