It happens so rarely to read a book and when you finish it to feel like something has changed inside you. Like suddenly you've started seeing the world from a different point of view, more universal, more absolute, more cosmic, more spiritual even.
While you're reading David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", you follow the story of 6 different people who live in different areas and periods of time but they're somehow connected. Is it coincidence? Reincarnation? Relation? Sheer luck? All that matters is that everyone affects the other -in the future and in the past- in a subtle but significant way. In a way that nobody's life would be the same without the other's existence.
And as you read these stories that go from past to present to distant future and then back to present and past, you can't help but feel like you're experiencing a small fragment of humanity's history -some told, some yet undiscovered-, like you're climbing a pyramid that'll give you a glimpse of the truth before you start diving back into the past to verify if humanity has changed even in the tiniest bit through all these years.
It is at times like this that you feel so alone, like your life is lead by nothing more than simple vainness ("Vanity of vanities! All is Vanity!). After all, we're all going to disappear someday and all that we've done is going to be lost in the labyrinths of time. It is at times like this, however, that you feel like you're part of a whole, like your every move, your every action is -possibly- going to affect something in the near or distant future and that is what gives your existence, your whole entity, a feeling of purpose. A hope that whatever you do will not be in vain. That you matter. That you might be a drop in the ocean, but you're still important. After all, "what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"
Congratulations, Mr. Mitchell. And thank you.
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