"Cloud Atlas"

[fiefoe]

Many fine escapes.

• my voice was jus’ a duck fart in a hurrycane.
• you don’t go countin’ ’em like goats, but the gone-lifes outnumber the now-lifes like leafs outnumber trees.
• Oh, bein’ young ain’t easy ’cos ev’rythin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ it for the first time.
• I wanted to kill ’em like prawns on a skewer, but slower’n that.
• Now the Hole World is big, but it weren’t big ’nuff for that hunger what made Old Uns rip out the skies an’ boil up the seas an’ poison soil with crazed atoms an’ donkey ’bout with rotted seeds so new plagues was borned an’ babbits was freak-birthed.
• Sonmi’d been birthed by a god o’ Smart named Darwin, that’s what we b’liefed.
• Abbess say-soed ’em not to ’cos times are pretendin’ can bend bein’.
• now flew with that burnin’ stick in his mouth, yay, toward home he headed, wings poundin’, stick burnin’, days passin’, hail slingin’, clouds black’nin’, oh, fire lickin’ up that stick, eyes smokin’, feathers crispin’, beak burnin’ … It hurts! Crow crawed. It hurts! Now, did he drop that stick or din’t he?
• pumpin’ an’ years passin’ an’ ev’ry drumbeat one more life shedded off of me, yay, I glimpsed all the lifes my soul ever was till far-far back b’fore the Fall, yay, glimpsed from a gallopin’ horse in a hurrycane,
• In war, Meronym teached me, first you anx ’bout your boots, only second you anx ’bout grinds’n’all.
• Now the Civ’lized got the same needs too, but he sees further. He’ll eat half his food now, yay, but plant half so he won’t go hungry ’morrow.
• “One day” was only a flea o’ hope for us. Yay, I mem’ry Meronym sayin’, but fleas ain’t easy to rid.
• 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.
• Lastly, a piebald light above the brazier morphed into a carp. A carp? A carp, as in the fish. A numinous, pearl-and-tangerine, fungus-blotted, mandarin-whiskered, half-meter-long carp. One lazy slap of its tail propelled the fish toward me. Roots of water lilies parted as it moved.
• He swabbed anesthetic over my throat, warning me this would hurt, but his tool’s damper would stop the bar code from xploding on contact with air.
• “And now,” he continued, “a crime so novel it doesn’t even have a name. The Souling of a fabricant.
• “Why not do the job yourself with gum and lipstick? Does Lady Heem-Young take Tiger Lily for a discount troweler’s with before-and-after kodaks in the window?”
• Us. Fabricants. We cost almost nothing to manufacture and have no awkward hankerings for a better, freer life. {Surely the most debatable setup.}
• “An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”
• Crosswater hills displayed mighty corp logos. A malachite statue of Prophet Malthus surveyed a dust bowl.
• Ah, mountain stars are not these apologetic pinpricks over conurb skies; hanging plump they drip lite.
• the brite spring sky’s sediment had sunk to a dark band of blue. Ah, it mesmerized me … like the snow had done. All the woe of the words “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully. Hae-Joo announced, “The ocean.”
• Additionally, leftover “reclaimed proteins” are used to produce Papa Song food products, eaten by consumers
• raisons-d’être are not to foment revolution. Firstly, it attracts social malcontents like Xi-Li and keeps them where Unanimity can watch them. Secondly, it provides Nea So Copros with the enemy required by any hierarchical state for social cohesion.
• the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.
• As if Art is the What, not the How!
• The dust was deep and crisp and even.  /“Us elderly are the modern lepers."
• The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide.
• “The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid” and, safe in her ignorance of J.D. Salinger
• Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.
• (A Scot can turn a perfectly decent name into a head-butt.)
• Poor England. Too much history for its acreage. Years grow inwards here, like my toenails.
• Mr. Meeks leaked a giggle, sucked toffees, and hummed “The British Grenadiers” as the Range Rover wolfed down the northward miles.
• He let out a biblical bellow. (Lars: zoom the camera in from the outside car park, across the busy bar, and right down between Mr. Meeks’s rotted tonsils.)
• in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones. Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.
• The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.
• Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past.
• One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.
• “So what’s the answer? Can you change the future or not?” Maybe the answer is not a function of metaphysics but one, simply, of power.
• twisted airplane pieces on a mountainside. “How … appalling!” Bill Smoke savors a complex dish, all of whose ingredients even he, the chef, can’t list.
• “Owners hire, fire, and say what’s fair. / Smoke still spills in senseless quantities.
• “Catch you all next time.” Luisa is going. “It’s a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.”
• The skein of green on the land seems less nature revivified, more nature mildewed.
• We cut a pack of cards called historical context—our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks, and queens. Adrian’s cut threes, fours, and fives. That’s all.
• “square,” in reality a pond of cobbly mud with a plinth plonked in its navel whose original inhabitant had long ago been melted down for bullets.
• What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will... The nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence.
• The v.d.V. daughters, a hydra of heads named Marie-Louise, Stephanie, Zenobe, Alphonsine...
• Pays himself unveiled compliments, beginning “Call me old-fashioned but …” or “Some consider me a snob but …”
• E.’s character depends on which angle you’re looking from, a quality of superior opals.
• Because I, only I, see her smile a fraction before it reaches her face... Because her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning... she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.
• for this cul-de-sac of a lie, for clearly I  / Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.
• Boundaries between noise and sound are conventions, I see now. All boundaries are conventions, national ones too.
• People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function.
• But by instilling in the slothful so-an’-sos a gentle craving for this harmless leaf, we give him an incentive to earn money, so he can buy his baccy—not liquor, mind, just baccy—from the Mission trading post.
• the tapering headland, noxious with fertility, & furry caterpillars, plump as my thumb, dropped from talons of exquisite heliconia.
• That’s what all beliefs turn to one day. Rats’ nests & rubble.”
• of all the world’s races, our love—or rather our rapacity—for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity, yes, powers our Progress;
• “ ‘But why me, Henry, are we not friends?’ Well, Adam, even friends are made of meat.
• history admits no rules; only outcomes.
• Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

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