The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

The cogs and levers of time swell and buckle in the heat.

The notes are spidery and starlit and spun from glass.

The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.

From what flickering dream, wonders Jacob, do I know your face?

Act, implores the Ghost of Future Regret. I shan’t give you another chance.

like a struck tuning fork, Jacob reverberates with the parts and the entirety of Orito, with all the her-ness of her.

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us, and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it “love.”

“The soul is a verb.” He impales a lit candle on a spike. “Not a noun.”

the weaverless loom of fortune.

“There are times when I suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past, and the might-one-day-be. This mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.”

If only, Shiroyama dreams, human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

“The truth of a myth, Your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.”

So little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disprove …”