OK, good to see I'm not just typing away to myself
So, the last post will be about Eternal Recurrence and those thoughts echoing through the six stories of Cloud Atlas, and various other connections between the stories:
- AE almost died at the hands of Dr HG > In the next story, Frobisher says that he "never met a quack whom I didn't half suspect of plotting to do me in as expensively as he could contrive" before he reads the 2nd half of AE's journal
- Frobisher writes a sextet for overlapping soloists > the layout of the book Cloud Atlas > "revolutionary or gimmicky?"
- AE's ship "Prophetess" is preserved & displayed at Cape Yerbas where Sixsmith's yacht is moored, and where Luisa Rey goes to find his documents
- Luisa Rey "remembers" the Chateau at Zedelghem when she reads Frobisher's letters
- Sonmi "remembers" Luisa's fall off the bridge
- Boerhaave was thrown off ship in A.E.'s journal > Luisa falls off the bridge > a literary critic gets thrown off a building at Timothy Cavendish's story > a replicant doll is thrown off a bridge in Sonmi's story
- AE's story takes place near Hawaii > Sonmi's replicants' heaven is Hawaii > Zach'ry's story takes place in Hawaii
- Luisa Rey's mother lives in "Ewingsville" > so named because the famous Abolitionist AE lived there?
- AE saves Autua who then saves AE back > Luisa Rey's father saves Napier who then saves his daughter Luisa
- About a ticket seller, TC says "the corporation breeds them from the same stem cell" > Sonmi & other sellers actually bred from the same stem cells (foreshadowing)
- HG tries to kill AE, slavery abound in their time, Maori kill & enslave Moriori as sub-humans > Frobisher wants to leech off Ayrs, Ayrs steals from Frobisher > corporation kills Sixsmith, doesn't care if nuclear disaster happens, wants to kill Luisa > old people are treated cruelly, like sub-humans > people enslave replicants because they are sub-human then kill them off > Kona enslave & kill valley people
- "Untermensch slums" > Sonmi's world still using Nietzsche terminology
- In Sonmi's world, the abbess of people living in the wild like Tibetans still pray to Siddharta = Buddha
- Meronym stayed with horse-raising tribe on Swannake Island where the nuclear plant that Luisa Rey investigated was
- Sonmi's password is "These are the tears of things" = Sunt lacrimae rerum which is how Frobisher ends his last letter
This is a significant phrase, from
Virgil's book
The Aeneid. While gazing at a scene of Trojan War (deaths of his friends & countrymen), he weeps and says "sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt" (these are tears of things and sufferings touch the mind, perhaps better translated as "the world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart", as in the Wikipedia link above), referring to the futility of war & waste of human life
References about eternal recurrence each story:
Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
A.E. says missionary's "gaze was gravid with the ancient future"
Letters from Zedelghem
- Ayrs' final major work to be named "Eternal Recurrence"
- Ayrs' "Bible" is Nietzsche's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra. Zarathustra was the founder of Zoroastrianism, which says God created twin spirits: One chose truth & light, the other chose untruth & darkness (alluding to the struggle between the savage and the civilized in each of us?)
- At the end, Frobisher says that he will be born to relive his life again, before he commits suicide
Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery
- "Half-lives" refers to (1) radiation, (2) structure of this book
- Richard says his guru "is on his last reincarnation" before Nirvana
- Luisa says Hitchcoc's best films are scary rollercoasters that let riders get off in the end ? giggling & eager for another ride. "The key to fictitious terror is partition or containment (Bates Motel is sealed off from the world). But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's the stuff of Buchoe, dystopia, depression" > No such luck in this book. Author doesn't let us giggle in the end.
- Sixsmith's niece does radioastronomy research at big satellite dishes in Hawaii > same place Zach'ry's people think is sacred/haunted in the end
Ghastly Ordeal Of Timothy Cavendish
- T.C. says re Luisa's account "not original, but there can't be anything not done 100 times between Aristophanes & Andrew Void Webber"
Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After
- They believe in reincarnation "we knew we'd always be reborn as Valleysmen, so death wasn't as scary for us" > unless Old Georgie gets you to behave like a savage (reminiscent of Moriori's philosophy of pacifism)
- Icon'ry ? diary/thoughts/lives of ancestors, for posterity
- Zach'ry sees a globe and says "if world is a ball, why don't we fall off?"
- They sing "Rudolph the Red-Ringed Goat Thief" > how the Xmas song has changed > fragility of knowledge
Although not technically recurrence per se, there is also the theme of
reincarnation (with the comet birthmark), from a psychopathic murderer (probably) and then an immoral & arrogant thief, to an altruistic person with principles who risks her life for what is right, then first a reluctant martyr and then to a deliberately altruistic person with morals and principles.
... and still this "improvement" of personality and behaviour of every soul "crossing ages like clouds cross the skies" doesn't save humanity. Why? Is it because reincarnated people don't remember their previous lives, except for fleeting visions of old castles and falling off bridges?