Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. David Mitchell is a god of words. A brilliant, utterly divine artist that pushes creative boundaries beyond akin to Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Mary Shelley, and their more modern equivalents (to which I’ll go more into in future posts).
When I first read Cloud Atlas, I waited for someone to jerk me from the blinding Utopian tunnel I suddenly found myself floundering, gasping in the radiance of such wit. It was all consuming. It pivoted my life into a rebirth of everything sublime and whole. I know no other words that gifted me with such beauty, hope, weightiness, and wisdom.
And when the indubitably ingenious Wachowski sisters rendered his words, hefting them further into that great ether, I died and lived yet again it was so fanfuckingtastic.
(oh look, more David Mitchell rebirth puns wink cough wink).
All hail the great collaborations and creative teams as this is one, if not, the best in human history. I said what I said.
What moral to draw? Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I’ve stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.
Whoever opined “Money can’t buy you happiness” obviously had far too much of the stuff.
No drug, no religious experience touches you like turning a man into a corpse.
‘Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.’
Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively.
In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.
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. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.
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