Last month, I
posted a series of my favorite quotes from David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, connecting his words to my recent set of six acrylic paintings. In that post, I mentioned that I was in the process of reading through all his novels in chronological order by publication date, and that I would write another post when I was finished, compiling some of my favorite ideas and quotes from his oeuvre. Today is that post.
After months of reading and rereading (many of his books I had read before, but not all of them), I finally finished
Slade House a few weeks ago. And now I'm finally getting around to reflecting on his "David Mitchell universe" as a whole.
My favorite Mitchell book is, obviously,
Cloud Atlas. Not only do I find his characters in that book particularly compelling/relatable; I also prefer the explanation given in that book for how souls can connect throughout time. This connection is mystical/spiritual in nature, not overt, and rather inexplicable. It creeps up in moments of deja vu, or in the process of living a creative life. Some characters feel connected to each other intuitively, or even seem to remember things that didn't happen to them - things that might have happened in a past life, but not in the one they are living. Some recognize these moments of deja vu and interpret them as reincarnation - not "proof" of its existence, per se, but enough to warrant contemplation of the possibility. Still other characters do not explicitly feel like they are a reincarnation; they have no specific memories. And yet, they too are connected to other characters, even though they may never realize it. They read their diaries, listen to their compositions, read their manuscripts, watch their movies, or learn of them in history books, revering what they do not understand and worshipping them as gods.
I don't know if "souls" are truly reincarnated or not, and in any case there is hardly a way to prove definitively either way. But humans
are able to feel inexplicable kinship with one another, and we do pass down bits of ourselves (our feelings, our experiences, our ideas) in creative works we produce and the legacy we leave behind. (Of course I want to believe that is true. I am an artist and a writer; I
make things in the hopes that the things I make will connect with people, both now and in the future. I want to leave a "mark" on the world that will outlive my mortal body.)
And it is precisely this idea of intuitive connection and passing down creative works to future generations that
Cloud Atlas embodies so well - which is why I love it so much. It feels
real. It is something that I could buy happening to our world.
In contrast, Mitchell's other books that deal with the idea of a soul take a more "science fiction" approach (
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Bone Clocks, and
Slade House). Without giving too much away, these books create a world in which (some) people are perfectly aware of their souls and the souls living in other people, and steps are made to try to ensure immortality by using this soul-knowledge to their advantage. There is a behind the scenes "war" in which people nurture themselves at the expense of others, and others do their damnedest to stop them.
It's an exciting story, to be sure - and certainly seems to be the way Mitchell is going for future books, given that his last three books all deal, at least partly, with this idea. But it is decidedly different than the more believable, more relatable, more mystical, and - I think - more fascinating way that souls and people interact in
Cloud Atlas.
That said, there is something to be gotten out of each of his books - even the ones that don't seem to touch on the idea of a soul/reincarnation. Here are some of my favorite quotes from each of his books:
[WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD.]
---
Ghostwritten (1999)
"We abdicate certain freedoms, and in return we get civilization."
"All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel...You have to make your place
inside your head."
"It's better to fight and lose than not fight and suffer, because even if you fight and lose your spirit emerges intact."
"The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me."
"For a moment I had an odd sensation of being in a story that someone was writing."
"I wonder if computers ever dream of humans."
"She didn't come in the dramatic way they do in movies. Nothing was hurled across the room, no ghosts in the machine, no silly messages typed on my computer or spelled out with fridge magnet letters. Nothing like
Poltergeist or
The Exorcist. More like a medical condition, that, while terminal, grows in such small increments that it is impossible to diagnose until too late."
"I'm sorry, but I don't have any spare time to give you."
"I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too."
"Now that I'm dying again I recognize the signs."
"The Holy Mountain didn't care about the stupid world of men."
"'The world's gone mad,' I said. 'Again.' 'And it will right itself,' said my Tree. 'Again.'"
"Kindness always make me weep. I don't know why."
"I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up."
"With the intuition of an old dying woman, I know she isn't telling the whole truth. With the certainty of an old dying woman, I know it's not the truth that much matters."
"It is so much easier to destroy than it is to re-create."
"I have only one fear: to be inhabiting a human at the moment of death."
"There's no future in stories...Stories are things of the past, things for museums."
"I
am my mind - do I have a mind I don't know about within my mind, like humans?...How do I know that there aren't
noncorpa living within me, controlling my actions? Like a virus within a bacteria? Surely I would know. But that's exactly what humans think."
"Everything is about wanting."
"It's a very special talent that men have, to possess seeing eyes yet be so blind."
"But what if the rats happened to like being in the maze?"
"Does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you're in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you're reading, it's fate all the way."
"The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting."
"We're all ghostwriters, my boy. And it's not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we're in control of our own lives, but really they're pre-ghostwritten by forces around us."
"Anyone can predict effects from a given cause."
"Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present."
"Even time is not immune to time."
"In five hundred years we are going to be either extinct, or...something better."
"The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed."
"Disbelieving the reality under your feet gives you a license to print your own."
"History is made of arbitrary choices."
"Information is control."
"Will my soul find a path out of these tunnels?"
---
Number9Dream (2003)
"A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it."
"Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are."
"Maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it."
"Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality."
"Human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most."
"The body is the outermost layer of the mind."
"I forget that other people in the world have broken parts, too."
"During those nine pouched-up months, what do babies imagine? Gills, swamps, battlefields? To people in wombs, what is imagined and what is real must be one and the same."
"People prefer loneliness to harmony."
---
Cloud Atlas (2004)
(For quotes from
Cloud Atlas see my previous post.)
---
Black Swan Green (2006)
"Adults can't be expected to understand."
"Games and sports're really about humiliating your enemies."
"It's not that I'll die that bothers me. It's that I'll be the last one."
"Dead things show you what you'll be too one day."
"Mentioning my stammer makes it realler."
"Try to will it out of existence, it'll just will itself back stronger."
"Identify a demand, handle its supply, make your customers grateful, kill off the opposition."
"Human beings needs to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice."
"The earth's a door, if you press your ear against it."
"War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins."
"How can the world just go on, as if none of this is happening?"
"War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery."
"Wars do not simply appear from nowhere. Wars come, over a long period of time, and believe me, there is always plenty of blame to be shared out between all those who failed to prevents its bloody arrival."
"
I want to bloody kick this
moronic bloody world in the bloody
teeth over and over till it bloody
understands that
not hurting people is ten bloody
thousand times more bloody important than being
right."
"Prettiness often papers over nastiness."
"Often I think boys don't
become men. Boys just get papier-mached inside a man's mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there."
"Isn't
no god better than one who does that to people?"
"The world unmakes stuff faster than people can make it."
"If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready.'"
"Beauty is
not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue."
"Your potter has made the vase, yes, but has
not made the beauty. Only an object where beauty
resides. Until the vase is dropped and breaks. Who is the ultimate fate of every vase."
"If you are not truthful to the world about who and what you are, your art will stink of falseness."
"Truth is everywhere, like seeds of trees; even deceits contain elements of truth. But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion, ennui, and, worst, television."
"Music's a wood you walk through."
"Speaking one language only is
prison."
"Magnets don't need to understand magnetism."
"Will
I be some kid's dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine?"
"People're a nestful of needs."
"Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty."
"Shunning one hopeless battle is not an act of cowardice."
"Questions aren't questions. Questions're bullets."
"The boy could preach till he's purple. They'd not believe him. They'd not
want to believe him."
"Courage is being scared shitless but doing it anyway."
"Is a secret a secret if it isn't true?...A secret needs a human agency to
know it, or at least write it down. A holder. A keeper."
"You think
you are in charge of the secret, but isn't it the
secret who's actually using
you? S'pose lunatics mold their doctors more than doctors mold their lunatics?"
"Dancing's like walking down a busy high street or millions of other things. You're absolutely fine as long as you don't think about it."
"Dancers think
they're in charge but they're obeying ancient orders."
"But once a lemon meringue's cut, no
amount of tears can make it whole."
"If consequences of consequences of consequences of what you do're your fault
too, you'd never leave your house."
---
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
"A sailor's heart's the sea's plaything, eh?"
"The world is composed of people who are convinced of it."
"Immortality comes at a steep price."
"
Respect, he thinks,
cannot be commanded from on high."
"Your own descendants yet unborn beg you to make the correct choice at this hour."
"Every seat of power in the empire is divided, and thereby neutered."
"Jacob finds himself as little able to evade the man's gaze as a book can, of its own volition, evade the scrutiny of a reader."
"Mortification...requires at least a little pride."
"What if people make bad choice and president is bad man?"
"The fairer sex can show as much resilience as the uglier one."
"When shaving, a man rereads his truest memoir."
"What sort of gift is it that the giver doesn't offer until he wants something from the intended recipient?"
"Power has an unpleasant taste."
"We must guard ourselves against our protectors."
"To doubt the soul would strike me as peculiar."
"But mine is the true faith...Whilst yours is idolatry."
"This is longest bridge you ever cross, because this bridge go between two worlds."
"To not say 'no' is to half say 'yes.'"
"High office, as you shall one day discover, distances one from one's men."
"It's a man's conduct that God is interested in, not the circumstances of his birth."
"What man
ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?...'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's."
"A tidy metaphor does not make a wrong thing right."
"The ladybird believes she is on a momentous journey, but she is going nowhere."
"I wish spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket."
"Creation unfolds around us, despite us, and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it 'love.'"
"To list and name people is to subjugate them."
"Slavery may be an injustice to some...but no one can deny that all empires are founded upon the institution."
"The soul is a verb. Not a noun."
"A carelessly tossed stone can sometimes results in a rock fall."
"Details beget facts, and facts, judiciously sent forth, become assassins."
"Expensive habit is
honesty. Loyalty ain't a simple matter."
"The scarcity of facts leaves holes where rumors breed."
"The present is a battleground...where rival what-ifs compete to become the future 'what is.'"
"For what is it that directs the minds of the powerful? The answer is 'belief.'... Power is informed by belief that
this path, and not another, must be followed."
"Self-pity is a noose dangling from a rafter."
"The belly craves food, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love, and the mind craves stories."
"Whatever a man is busy with, that is what, or whom, he values."
"Isolation, ingenuity, power...fear. These achieve most ends."
"It is not superstition but reason that concludes the realm of knowledge is finite and that the brain and the soul are discrete entities."
"Your soul knows what your mind is too knowledgeable to understand."
"The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past, and the might-one-day-be."
"My true name I tell nobody, so nobody can steal my name."
"Why must all things go around in stupid circles?"
"If only 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."
"Admission of weakness
is a weakness."
"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love."
"The easiest way to control others is to give them the illusion of free will."
"The truth of a myth...is not its words but its patterns."
"One must be wary of understanding one's enemy, lest one becomes him."
"Nobody ever died for a flag, only what the flag symbolizes."
"This world contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself."
"The purest believers are the truest monsters."
"A great teacher attains immortality in his students."
---
The Bone Clocks (2014)
"Promise me you'll memorize the path through it, so if you ever needed to, you could navigate it in the darkness.
Please."
"The brain could be an illogical place."
"People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can't."
"Pity is a form of abuse."
"What if...what if heave
is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're
dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reason, or...S'pose heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging their forever, but more like...like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snitches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or...upstairs windows when you're lost..."
"Psychologists say there's a second umbilical cord, an invisible one, an emotional one, which ties you to your parents for the whole time you're a kid. Then, one day, you have a row with your mum if you're a girl, or your dad if you're a boy, and that argument cuts your second cord. Then, and only then, are you ready to go off into the big wide world and be an adult on your own terms."
"Perhaps daymares are like cancer, which goes away and comes back when you think you're all clear."
"Capitalism eats itself. When it can't feed the millions it spits out, no amount of lies or brutality will save it."
"Being born's a hell of a lottery."
"Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going."
"When you know your memory's been monkeyed around with once, how can you ever be sure of any memory again?"
"You make a list, see. It's called 'All the Things I'll Never, Ever Do to Get By.' The list stays exactly the same, but its name changes to 'All the Things I've Had to Do to Get By.'"
"I think about pinball, and how being a kid's like being shot up the firing lane and there's no veering left or right; you're just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you're sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there's a thousand different paths you can take, some amazing, others not. Tiny little differences in angles and speed'll totally alter what happens to you later..."
"Victims aren't cowards. Outsiders, like, they never have a clue how brave you have to be just to carry on."
"Power is the ability to make someone do what they otherwise wouldn't, or deter them from doing what they otherwise would."
"Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul."
"Mortality is inscribed in your cellular structure, and you say you're not ill?"
"When civilization shuts up shop, a gun'll be worth any number of university degrees."
"You'd think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we're all heading to."
"Whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge, or beauty I'll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man."
"Coupling is frenzy; decoupling is farce."
"Persuasion is not about force; it's about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it."
"Perhaps this will just be one of life's dangly plot lines that one never revisits."
"Human beings are walking bundles of cravings. Cravings for food, water, shelter, warmth; sex and companionship; status, a tribe to belong to; kicks, control, purpose; and so on, all the way down to chocolate-brown bathroom suites. Love is one way to satisfy some of those cravings. But love's not just the drug; it's also the dealer. Love wants love in return."
"We're all of different things at different times."
"Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love's a dictator."
"People are superb at not thinking about awkward truths."
"You only value something if you know it'll end."
"You need a leap of faith to leave your old life behind. True metamorphosis doesn't come with flowcharts."
"If an atrocity isn't written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die."
"When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it."
"Wrong turns teach us the right way."
"God is willing to trust us with the small print."
"It's not just that you get old and your kids leave; it's that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in."
"However much you love them, your own children are only ever on loan."
"We all of us have less time than we think."
"Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither."
"Bury the hatchet. Hatchets don't work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself."
"Men marry women hoping they'll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed."
"The secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you're over forty."
"Modesty is Vanity's craftier stepbrother."
"When I remember my mother, am I remembering her, or just memories of her?"
"For most digital-age writers, writing
is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap."
"Even if a poet sets out to invent a new poetics, he or she can only react against what's already there."
"Writers don't write in a void."
"A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and yes, to a degree, your sanity."
"Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? O are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths, only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us?"
"Some truths are inadmissible in the court of the sane."
"Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions."
"One cannot cross the same river twice."
"Each resurrection is a lottery of longitudes, latitudes, and demography."
"Yes, I am only a pawn, but a game of chess may hinge upon the conduct of a single pawn."
"If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others."
"The Script loves foreshadow."
"The future looks a lot like the past."
"All great cities do and must revert to jungle, tundra, or tidal flats, if you wait long enough, and I should know."
"I'd rather trust my memory than my eyes."
"We live on, as long as there are people to live on in."
"If you could reason with religious people, there wouldn't be any religious people."
"There is no God but the one we dream up."
"If you can't trust your mind anymore, you're mentally homeless."
"Change is sort of hardwired into the world."
"If life didn't change, it wouldn't be life."
"The 'natural order of things' is entirely man-made."
"Civilization's like the economy, or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it's real, it dies."
---
Slade House (2015)
"My question falls down a deep well with no bottom, and I forget what I've forgotten."
"Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic
F if anyone ever writes 'I woke up and it was all a dream' at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream."
"Dream-people always say they're real, so pardon me for not believing you."
"It can't hold forever and it won't."
"People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go."
"Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed."
"Once you've been a psychiatric patient, no one ever gives you the benefit of the doubt again. Easier to fix a bad credit rating than a bad credibility rating."
"Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don't you find?"
"Death's life's only guarantee, yes?"
"In war, ends justify means. War
is ends justifying means."
"Memory's a slippery eel at the best of times."
"One percent is still...too many."
