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777739b
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He's one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won't, possibly can't, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.
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Michael Cunningham |
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86c3aee
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Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want." "What do we want?" I asked blurrily. "Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted." "What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said."
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Michael Cunningham |
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3a8f0b1
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The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Classira pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion.
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Michael Cunningham |
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5ad9d59
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Eventually, decades later, when the king was dying, the queen gently ushered everybody out into the corridor, closed the door to the royal bedchamber, and got into bed with her husband. She started singing to him. They laughed. He was short of breath, but he could still laugh. They asked each other, Is this silly? Is this...pretentious? But they both knew that everything there was to say had been said already, over and over, across the year..
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death-of-a-loved-one
love
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Michael Cunningham |
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1dc0217
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It's better, really, to go out in a blaze. That's why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire.
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fire
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Michael Cunningham |
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2465c70
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He knows about damage the way a woman does. He knows, the way a woman knows, how to carry on as if nothing's wrong.
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Michael Cunningham |
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7df57c8
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He is still, at times, astonished by her. She may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read for centuries.
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Michael Cunningham |
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05d2141
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You don't necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours.
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Michael Cunningham |
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b9b98b7
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Any other vexations to report?" he asks. "I love the word 'vexations.'" "It's the 'x.' Nice to jump off a 'v' and bite into an 'x' like that." "Just the usual ones," she says. "How was the weekend?" "Vexing. Not really, I just wanted to say it. You?"
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Michael Cunningham |
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7aa31bd
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The song is an unvarnished love shout, an implorement tinged with...anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosoher, the anger of a pot. An anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away, that we're being shown marvels but reminded always that they don't belong to us. They're sultans' treasures; we're lucky, we're e..
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life
life-and-death
mortality
preciousness
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Michael Cunningham |
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44076de
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That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.
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Michael Cunningham |
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930b194
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End of story. 'Happily ever after' fell on everyone like a guillotine's blade.
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Michael Cunningham |
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7946967
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The point of sex is... Sex doesn't have a point.
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Michael Cunningham |
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e8e12af
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The problem with the truth is, it's so often mild and cliched.
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Michael Cunningham |
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3f2f720
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He believes that a real work of art can be owned but should not be subject to capture; that it should radiate such authority, such bizarre but confident beauty (or unbeauty) that it can't be undone by even the most ludicrous sofas or side tables. A real work of art should rule the room, and the clients should call up not to complain about the art but to say that the art has helped them understand how the room is all a horrible mistake, can ..
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Michael Cunningham |
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5882ed3
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It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
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Michael Cunningham |
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d4b9b84
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If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I dont think two people could have been happier than we have been.
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Michael Cunningham |
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6f94ab4
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It's remarkable, being alive.
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Michael Cunningham |
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1fad04b
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The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic.
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tale
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Michael Cunningham |
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4c7e5e0
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We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster before we're wrapped in our winding sheets, and returned.
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life-lessons
living
purpose
purposeful-living
wisdom
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Michael Cunningham |
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0d7927d
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Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways - you have not imagined the lives of others.
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Michael Cunningham |
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0058dc7
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It's impossible to imagine, isn't it? Most men probably go through the same motions, more or less, but what's in their minds, what agitates their blood? What could be more mortifyingly personal, what veers closer to the depths, than whatever it is that makes us come? If we knew, if we could see what's in the cartoon balloons over other guy's heads as they jerk off, would we be moved, or repelled?
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Michael Cunningham |
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e4de6eb
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He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as his and Rebecca's living ghosts, the amalgamation of their dreams and their breathing, their smells. He does not believe in ghosts, but he believes in...something. Something viable, something living, that's surprised when he wakes at this hour, that's neither glad nor sorry to see him awake but that recognizes the fact, because it has b..
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Michael Cunningham |
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aead2e9
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She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.
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life
sadness
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Michael Cunningham |
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320ac14
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There's no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects.
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alienation
life
melancholy
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Michael Cunningham |
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5ca0b22
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Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings.
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Michael Cunningham |
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7a97f39
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The book worm, the foreign-looking one with the dark, close set eyes an the Roman nose, who had never been sought after or cherished; who had always been left alone, to read.
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Michael Cunningham |
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8f63aad
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She lays the book face down on her chest. Already her bedroom (no, their bedroom) feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers.
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Michael Cunningham |
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8535810
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What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around the pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows. That was the moment. There has been no other.
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Michael Cunningham |
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65cf85a
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A sensation rose in him, a high tingling of his blood. There came a wave, a wind that recognized him, that did not love him or hate him. He felt what he knew as the rising of his self, the shifting innerness that yearned and feared, that was more familiar to him than anything could ever be. He knew that an answering substance gathered around him, emanating from the trees and the stars. He stood staring at the constellations. Walt had sent h..
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Michael Cunningham |
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7b86c93
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Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect.
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Michael Cunningham |
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1ecb715
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What he remembers with perfect clarity is sitting on a train headed for Madrid, feeling the sort of happiness he imagines spirits might feel, freed of their earthly bodies but still possessed of their essential selves.
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Michael Cunningham |
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cc33b6e
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You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.
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Michael Cunningham |
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b7e34b3
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There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lived seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
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Michael Cunningham |
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9d09c8c
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There's no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze - the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition and not the rarest of mutations.
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Michael Cunningham |
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2c9992e
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Catherine thought Simon was in the locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn't expect him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with.
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Michael Cunningham |
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3a29c23
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It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but to old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we can in fact create.
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Michael Cunningham |
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2af6fa6
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One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
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Michael Cunningham |
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d0d27a3
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But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is, and how to open it. With that, you're gone
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Michael Cunningham |
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32b58d5
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This is a Southern gift, isn't it - tremendous self-regard diluted with humor and modesty. That's what they mean by Southern charm, right?
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Michael Cunningham |
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3f72361
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Here's the sting of livingness. He's back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he's renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people who burn and want, who remember everything, who walk lucid and unafraid.
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living-life
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Michael Cunningham |
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fa36450
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The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects.
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Michael Cunningham |
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3d1b0ba
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Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
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Michael Cunningham |
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e34bf83
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Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.
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Michael Cunningham |