Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

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

The Maori proved themselves apt pupils of the English in “the dark arts of colonization.”

What moral to draw? Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

I asked Finbar if he thought the boy was “fitting in well.” Finbar’s Delphic reply, “Fitting what in well, Mr. Ewing?” left the galley cackling but myself quite in the dark.

“Are you mad?” Always a trickier question than it looks. “I doubt it.”

Pater’s only “concerned” because my creditors are shaking him to see if any banknotes drop from the family tree. Debts of a disinherited son, however, are nobody’s business but the son’s—believe me, I’ve looked into the legalities. Mater is not “frantic.” Only the prospect of the decanter running dry could make Mater frantic.

Blind, emaciated fiddler performed for coins. Now he could play. Requested “Bonsoir, Paris!” and he performed with such élan I pressed a crisp five-franc note into his hand. He removed his dark glasses, checked the watermark, invoked his pet saint’s name, gathered his coppers, and scarpered through the flower beds, laughing like a madcap. Whoever opined “Money can’t buy you happiness” obviously had far too much of the stuff.

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.

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying good-bye.

“Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk.

There’s the blind, Mr. Grimaldi, there’s the willfully blind, and then there’s the soon to be retired.”

My state of grace was thanks in part to this check, and in part to a 1983 Chablis from the Duruzoi vineyard, a magic potion that dissolves our myriad tragedies into mere misunderstandings.

I watched a worm return to soil and wished I was it.

One day, I promised, I’m going to live in a house like this. Another promise I’ve broken; at least that one was only to myself.

Old Father Timothy offers this advice to his younger readers, included for free in the price of this memoir: conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one—or a hired one, it matters not—to take you home.

“Not our fault neither. SouthNet run the trains. We’re Ticket-Lords, see.” “Then to whom do I complain?” “Well, SouthNet Loco are owned by a holding company in Düsseldorf who are owned by that mobile-phone company in Finland, so you’d be best off trying someone in Helsinki. You should thank your lucky stars it wasn’t a derailment. Get a lot of those, these days.”

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

Fact: rolling stock in this country is built in Hamburg or somewhere, and when the German engineers test British-bound trains, they use imported lengths of our buggered, privatized tracks because the decently maintained European rails won’t provide accurate testing conditions.

His teeth were biscuit colored. Were he a horse, you couldn’t have given him away,

perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.

Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively.

“What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?” I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy.

Beardy Leary was mumblin’ his Hilo spells an’ shakin’ his magic tufty spikers to drive off evil spirits. Din’t seem Leary was helpin’ much, nay, Catkin was dyin’, the air smelled of it, but Ma wanted Leary there, see you’ll b’lief in a mil’yun diff’rent b’liefin’s if you reck’n jus’ one of ’em may aid you.

I mem’ry she answered, Yay, Old Uns’ Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’ humans, yay, a hunger for more.

Anyhow, the day was dyin’ in soddy clouds an’ we was still some miles shy o’ Honokaa, so we tented up for the night an’ throwed dice for watch, see, times was bad an’ we din’t want to risk no ambush. I got a six’n’six so maybe my luck was healin’, so I thinked, fool o’ fate what I am, yay, what we all are.

Prescients don’t b’lief souls exist. But ain’t dyin’ terrorsome cold if there ain’t nothin’ after? Yay—she sort o’ laughed but not smilin’, nay—our truth is terrorsome cold.

“One day” was only a flea o’ hope for us. Yay, I mem’ry Meronym sayin’, but fleas ain’t easy to rid.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow?

Every conurb, my guide answered, has a chemical toilet where the city’s unwanted human waste disintegrates quietly, but not quite invisibly. It motivates the downstrata: “Work, spend, work,” say slums like Huamdonggil, “or you, too, will end your life here.”

Meticulous brains will overlook the simple.

All rising suns set, Archivist. Our corpocracy now smells of senility.

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.

“Freedom!” is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

“Well, at least he visits her.” “And here’s why.” An attractive, wicked gleam illuminated the old lady. “When Mrs. Hotchkiss got wind of his plan to pack her off to Aurora House, she crammed every last family gem into a shoe box and buried it. Now she can’t remember where, or she can remember but isn’t saying.”

Sweet fantasy. Cancer for the cure.

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides…I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.

Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone.

“The place’ll sure feel empty without a real woman to crack chauvinist jokes on. Nance is actually a man after so many decades in a newsroom.” Nancy O’Hagan thumps her jammed typewriter and gives Nussbaum the finger. “Yeah, like”—Roland Jakes surveys Luisa’s empty desk, glumly—“I still don’t believe how, y’ know, the new guys’d give you the high jump but keep on a mollusk like Nussbaum.”

It’s true what Lehrer said. A world that’ll award Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize throws us all out of a job.”

“Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.”

At the van de Veldes’ town house, the girls were arranged on the stairway to greet me in ascending order of age—half-expected ’em to burst into song, and stone the crows, Sixsmith, that’s what they did.

Don’t worry, I’m not writing you a confession of homicide. Working on my sextet while evading a manhunt would be far too much trouble, and ending one’s career swinging in soiled underwear is hardly dignified. Even worse, murdering Eva’s father in cold blood might put the kibosh on her feelings for me.

Prophets went blind if they saw Jehovah. Not deaf, but blind, you appreciate the significance. Could still hear him.

You’re a brilliant physicist, your Rutherford chap et al. agree you’ve got a brilliant future, quite sure they’re right. But in some fundamentals you’re a dunce. The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken. You’d try to list all the reasons for living, but I left ’em behind at Victoria Station back in early summer. Reason I crept back down from the belvedere was that I can’t have you blaming yourself for failing to dissuade me. You may anyway, but don’t, Sixsmith, don’t be such an ass.

The pagan mind is impressed with material display, you see. He thinks:—How spick & span are Christians’ houses! How dirty our hovels! How generous the White God is! How mean is ours!’ In this way, one more convert is brought to the Lord.”

You must understand, sir, your typical Polynesian spurns industry because he’s got no reason to value money. ‘If I hungry,’ says he, ‘I go pick me some, or catch me some. If I cold, I tell woman, “Weave!” ’ Idle hands, Mr. Ewing, & we both know what work the Devil finds for them.

Since Agincourt, the White man has refined & evolved the gunpowder sciences until our modern armies may field muskets by the tens of thousands! ‘Aha!’ you will ask, yes, ‘But why us Aryans? Why not the Unipeds of Ur or the Mandrakes of Mauritius?’ Because, Preacher, of all the world’s races, our love—or rather our rapacity—for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity, yes, powers our Progress; for ends infernal or divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my Maker cast me on the winning side.”

But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. ‘The weak are meat, the strong do eat.’

one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature?