If we could see the future of what we are thinking, saying and doing today, would we change what we are thinking, saying and doing?
Mindful of Aryadeva pointing out that what results from a given moment is determined by our intention and compassion and interested in the recent discussion about the book, Cloud Atlas, I wanted to share my enthusiasm for the book, encourage you to read it and invite all of us to share books (and other media) which serve to expand, refine, inform and deepen our study of TSK. I had never heard of David Mitchell before this and the film will not be in England until next February, so I came fresh to it.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the book points to how decisions taken in ignorance repercuss across time. It weaves a series of interconnected tales which criss-cross temporal lineages, through an awesome versatility of language, style and sensitivity to historical period. I was reminded often of Jack’s reference to our endeavour in studying and practising TSK as being ‘heroic’ and that in communicating as we do through this site, we are building a ‘heroic community.’
Dust jacket blurb:
A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in Belgium between the First and Second World Wars; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; the testament of a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation – the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.
If you don’t like knowing endings ahead of time, don’t read this next bit…!
The book ends with Adam Ewing (the scrivener of the Pacific Journal) saying, “If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races and 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 and 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.â€
And…
“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?â€