Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

(“Embrace your enemy,” Henry quipped, “to feel his dagger tickle your kidneys.”)

Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

The well-dressed man on the telephone, pallid for this tanned city, repeats the inquiry: “Cloud Atlas Sextet…Robert Frobisher…As a matter of fact I have heard of it, though I’ve never laid my sticky paws on an actual pressing.… Frobisher was a wunderkind, he died just as he got going.… Let me see here, I’ve got a list from a dealer in San Fran who specializes in rarities.… Franck, Fitzroy, Frobisher…Here we go, even a little footnote.… Only five hundred recordings pressed…in Holland, before the war, my, no wonder it’s rare.… The dealer has a copy of an acetate, made in the fifties…by a liquidated French outfit. Cloud Atlas Sextet must bring the kiss of death to all who take it on.… I’ll try, he had one as of a month ago, but no promises on the sound quality, and I must warn you, cheap it ain’t.… It’s quoted here at…one hundred twenty dollars…plus our commission at ten percent, that makes…It is? Okay, I’ll take your name down.… Ray who? Oh, Miss R-E-Y, so sorry. Normally we ask for a deposit, but you’ve got an honest voice. A few days. You’re welcome now.”

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.

‘Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.’

I don’t know why it is, but secrets jus’ rot you like teeth if you don’t yank ’em out.

I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’ that kayak. 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? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.

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.

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction—in short, belief—grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune) Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up—a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows—the actual past—from another such si...

The color of monotony is blue.

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?