I'm according myself a half hour of "rest", so here it goes:
Aside from strong prey on the weak and civilisation, another major theme in Cloud Atlas is the fragility of knowledge - we reach wisdom and understanding in old age but we soon die, and we can't really leave this wisdom/knowledge to future generations. What we manage to leave behind is invariably distorted and possibly even incomprehensible to our grandchildren and beyond.
In Cloud Atlas, this theme is portrayed as the great tragedy of humanity, imho. This is why we are bound to repeat past generations' mistakes - because we don't really know the lessons our ancestors learned the hard way.
This theme is repeated in each story:
Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
- Moriori are actually the Maori who have travelled to Chatham Island & within a few generations, forgot to make ships and even forgot their origins and their tribe's name (I learned this not from Cloud Atlas but from an interview with David Mitchell)
- Autua witnesses the death of his culture at the hands of Maori (just like Zach'ry later witnesses the death of his at the hands of the Kona)
- Rafael (young sailor) says a song is "the only thing he still has of his mum"
- Polynesian missionary town's many children are naked & they behave like natives > forgotten their own culture's ways
- Missionaries forbid natives from going on sacred grounds > native children don't even know names of old idols anymore
Letters from Zedelghem
- Frobisher & Dhondt know that humans' will to power & powers of destruction will "snuff out homo sapiens" but wisdom doesn't get transmitted to others around them
Half ?Lives: First Luisa Rey Mystery
- Luisa embellishes the story of her father with each retelling (story changes over time)
- Megan sees an old woman's portrait and thinks "She sees things that I don't"
- Right before his plane explodes, Isaac Sachs has an epiphany and writes:
(1)
actual past (fades as witnesses die off and documents perish)
vs virtual past (created from hearsay, reworked memories, fiction = belief, and grows ever stronger and eclipses actual past)
(2)
virtual future (= wishes, dreams, prophecies, may influence near future)
vs actual future (will eclipse virtual future when its time comes)
... and of course this insight perishes in an instant when the bomb goes off.
In this story, David Mitchell has done something very clever (imho) and not only
said "knowledge is so fragile that we don't know much that was so important a few years back" but
proved it. We all read the name of this story, know the name of the protagonist, and the part where she falls off a bridge. Did any of us remember
The Bridge of San Luis Rey? By all accounts, it is a great book - Pulitzer Prize Winner published in 1927 that tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of a bridge.
Is the author saying "Look, even such a great book is now completely forgotten, such that you didn't pick up on 'Luisa Rey' falling off a bridge. So what hope do any of us have that our books/accounts/stories will be remembered?"
This sort of thing separates very good books from truly great ones, imho
Anyway, this theme of the fragility of knowledge and attempts to make one's stories last continues in the other parts of the book:
Ghastly Ordeal Of Timothy Cavendish
- TC is in the business of "vanity publishing" ? his authors want to present their bound memoirs to friends, to family, for posterity > so that their experiences/lives are not forgotten
- TC reads "The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire" (foreshadowing)
- TC receives Luisa Rey's story and thinks it is fiction (Is cultural memory so short that he wouldn't know/remember such a highly publicised event?)
- Old men are expected to be invisible, silent, and scared, rather than listened to for their experience and wisdom
- TC says "The world tolerates dictators, perverts, and drug barons but slowness of old people, it cannot abide"
An Orison of Sonmi-451
- "451" seems to be a nod at Fahrenheit 451, dystopian book about censorship & control of knowledge to suppress dissenting ideas, as if those ideas never existed (451 F is the temperature at which paper auto-combusts)
- Sonmi also talks about this in her account.
(1)"Why does state outlaw history? Is it because history provides a bank of human experience that rivals the media's?"
(2) "Time is the speed at which the past disappears. As if the dead are saying 'We were as you are, the present doesn't matter'"
Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After
- Pretty much the entire knowledge base of humanity has disappeared, following a catastrophic event
- Satellite dishes in Hawaii where Sixsmith's niece used to work are now considered sacred/haunted > their purpose is forgotten