Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

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

she has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself.

Adultery is a tricky duet to pull off, Sixsmith – as in contract bridge, eschew partners clumsier than oneself or one winds up in a ghastly mess.

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.

Blissweed was foggin’ me still an’ I heard near-far shouts o’ wild partyin’ tho’ a misty dawn was ’ready up, yay, it happens so at harvest barterin’s, times are. So I yawned’n’stretched, yay, achin’n’feelin’ all good’n’scooped, y’know how it is when you shoot up a beautsome girl.

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.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

you don’t do it for the money, you forgot how easily littler mortals

I know not the answer, nor whence flew the surety of my younger years.

My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the entropy written within our nature?

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.

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?