Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

the Maori don’t take kindly to us Pakeha spoiling their Moriori with too much civilization.’

‘Have you ever seen Maori warriors in a blood-frenzy, Mr Ewing?’ I said I had not. ‘But you have seen sharks in a blood-frenzy, have you not?’ I replied that I had. ‘Near enough. Imagine a bleeding calf is thrashing in shark-infested shallows. What to do – stay out of the water or try to stay the jaws of the sharks? Such was our choice.

Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine.

After ten pages I felt Nietzsche was reading me, not I him, so I watched the water-boatmen and newts while my mind-orchestra performed Fred Delius’s Air and Dance. Syrupy florentine of a piece, but its drowsy flute is rather successful.

The ticket-wallah, whose pimples bubbled as I watched, was as intractably dense as his counterpart in King’s Cross. The corporation breeds them from the same stem cell.

The cold sank its fangs into my exposed neck and frisked me for uninsulated patches.

Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

First, a voice began speaking inside my head. It alarmed me greatly, until I learnt nobody else heard it; the voice of sentience.

true knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance.

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

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

But, overall, I concluded the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption-thriller had potential. (The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, ‘But it’s been done a hundred times before!’ – as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!)

The reductio ad absurdum of M.D.’s view, I argued, was that science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction. M.D. embraced my objection with mordant glee. ‘Precisely. Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!

Mrs Wagstaff’s contempt for her young husband, if bottled, could have been vended as rat-poison.

“Why tinker with the plain truth that we hurry the darker races to their graves in order to take their land & its riches? Wolves don’t sit in their caves, concocting crapulous theories of race to justify devouring a flock of sheep! ‘Intellectual courage’? True ‘intellectual courage’ is to dispense with these fig-leaves & admit all peoples are predatory, but white predators, with our deadly duet of disease-dust & fire-arms, are examplars of predacity par excellence, & what of it?”’

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?