Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

“the melancholy that comes from learning that what is in a novel is fictional.”

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

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

Prone I lay,

Prone I lay, I slumber not.

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false.

Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”

how could I understand such a limitless world?

Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively.

Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow?

Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanish’d gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

But place its mouth against your ear and you hear the world in a different way.

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world.

Is this the doom written within our nature?

He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!” Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Such an origin story isn’t a lie, but it rides roughshod over the subtleties and intricacies of how a novel intermingles with Truth. Novels are confluences. The streams flowing into them are numerous and often unmappable.