Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my fathers generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Dont recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilizations architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employers profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didnt, the wolves and blizzards would be at ones throat all the sooner.
About This Quote
About David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
Themes
- Music — The universal language of melody, rhythm, and harmony