Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

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.

I shall describe what befell me this day, steering as close to the facts as is possible.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Whoever opined “Money can’t buy you happiness” obviously had far too much of the stuff.

I put it to the great man, the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that’s…the stuff of Buchenwald, dystopia, depression.

“I’ll telephone you, Miss Rey.” says Sixsmith, as Luisa hands him his stick, “soon.” Will I break this promise or keep it? “Do you know?” he says. “I feel I’ve known you for years, not ninety minutes.”

Like Grimaldi says, every conscience has an off switch somewhere.

“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.…

“The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage.

Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world’s Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying ‘guest fees’ to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media—and not just The Washington Post—is where democracies conduct their civil wars.”

All the seats were taken, and I had to squeeze into a three-inch slot. I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. The Diagonal People.

Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. “Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”

We are only what we know, and I wished to be much more than I was, sorely.

My soul may be stoned an’ my luck may be rotted but I can still cuss a cuss.

It ain’t savages what are stronger’n Civ’lizeds, Meronym reck’ned, it’s big numbers what’re stronger’n small numbers. Smart gived us a plus for many years, like my shooter gived me a plus back at Slopin’ Pond, but with ’nuff hands’n’minds that plus’ll be zeroed one day.

List’n, savages an’ Civ’lizeds ain’t divvied by tribes or b’liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev’ry human is both, yay. Old Uns’d got the Smart o’ gods but the savagery o’ jackals an’ that’s what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ’lized heart beatin’ in their ribs. Maybe some Kona. Not ’nuff to say-so their hole tribe, but who knows one day? One day.

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.

Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an’ a few yarnin’s got a lot o’ true.

“An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”

My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “rights,” the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.

Poor England. Too much history for its acreage. Years grow inwards here, like my toenails.

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.

London darkens the map like England’s bowel polyp.

The woman was sincere—bigots mostly are—but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed.

(He who pays the historian calls the tune)

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ’cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished, and by then it’ll be too late,

“When the pox began its deadly work, the Polynesians needed succor, both spiritual & material. Our compassion then brought the heathen to the holy font.

Mrs. Horrox answered my query about the enforcement of law & order in this lonesome outpost of Progress. “Our Church Council—my husband & three wise elders—passes those laws we deem necessary, with guidance of prayer. Our Guards of Christ, certain Natives who prove themselves faithful servants of the Church, enforce these laws in return for credit at my husband’s store. Vigilance, unflagging vigilance, is vital, or by next week …” Mrs. Horrox shuddered as apostasy’s phantoms danced a hula on her grave.

Cpt. Molyneux asked, “Sir, how does one fund a Mission as industrious as yours?” Preacher Horrox felt the breeze change & scrutinized the captain afresh. “Arrowroot starch & cocoa-nut oil defray costs, Captain. The Blacks work on our plantation to pay for the school, Bible study & church. In a week, God will it, we shall have an abundant harvest of copra.”

I asked if the Indians worked of their own free will. “Of course!” exclaimed Mrs. Horrox. “If they succumb to sloth, they know the Guards of Christ will punish them for it.”