I feel the need to resist the temptation to read it in editing mode, and change everything. I want to say, ‘well done’ to the kid I was when I wrote it. It’s the best thing I could have written at the time.
Cloud Atlas is my hit album. It has sold more than anything else I’ve ever written. It bought me some financial and literary independence.
I think interconnection as an archetypal theme got into me when I was a kid. Or maybe, it was this obsession with causality. An early memory of mine is of my grandfather, who was a tailor.
He got a job during WWII in a factory in North India to make military uniforms. My grandfather and his family spent the duration of the war in India. SS Cairo, a white liner went with my father from Southampton and docked in Mumbai.
I still have a postcard of it. The next trip out, it was hit by a German torpedo, and it sunk. Some people survived, others didn’t.
But that just hit me hard. All of these causalities; this sort of infinite domino tip-tip-tip-tip..
.is what reality is. And, that is delicious to me.
Reincarnation or karma is a prominent archetype in your works. Your interpretation of the concept is quite close to the Hindu beliefs. I am agnostic, but this doesn’t mean that religious concepts aren’t useful.
When Christian, and some non-Christian, cultures talk about heaven and hell, I find the words to be useful instruments. Karma is like an intellectual equipment to use. Even in the course of a life, I think most of us die, and.