I’m just about finished reading Cloud Atlas. Wow. Really good book. The hype on the jacket is valid. Etc. A book that can change your way of seeing things. And a terriffic story too.
So anyway, one of about sixteen thousand quotes I would like to have written up…
“You must understand, sir, your typical Polynesian spurns industry because he’s got no reason to value money. ‘If I hungry,’ says he, ‘I go pick me some, or catch me some. If I cold, I tell woman, “Weave!’ ” Idle hands, Mr. Ewing, & we both know what work the Devil finds for them. But by instilling in the slothful so-an’-sos a gentle craving for this harmless leaf, we give him an incentive to earn money, so he can buy his baccy — not liquor, mind, just baccy — from the Mission trading post. Ingenious, wouldn’t you say?”
Context, nearly impossible to relate here… but, in this short little aside, given by a very very very minor sub-character, in a tail-end cul-desac part of the final shell of the whole novel, gave me more insight into one level of the bigger thrust of the novel. We’re dupes. Manipulated into consuming. Etc. That whole argument. It thinks me hard about why we continue to be “allowed” to smoke tobacco by our governments.
I’m not one to list favorites, so I won’t.