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4b4b69a
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She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed.
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numb-depression
preparation-to-face-the-day
putting-on-an-act
domestic-life
loved-ones
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Michael Cunningham |
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e3fb97a
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I knew how I sounded - slow and oafish, like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if he'd planned it that way. I couldn't quite tell her about the daily beauty, how I didn't tire of seeing 6 a.m. light on the telephone wires. When I was younger, I'd expected to grow out of the gap between the self I knew and what I heard myself say. I'd expected to feel more like one single person.
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Michael Cunningham |
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84864d3
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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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5f8d561
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He moved in a world of chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.
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Michael Cunningham |
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6100c6c
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Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.
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Michael Cunningham |
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6e238ef
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Visions are answers. Answers imply questions. It
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Michael Cunningham |
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333745b
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It's your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.
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Michael Cunningham |
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bf56b16
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He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced.
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Michael Cunningham |
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25e3703
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This is one of the most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead. Her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her, an all but describable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the..
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Michael Cunningham |
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34936de
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Unfamiliar insects produced a soft but insistent chirp; a crisp whir like the sound the earth itself might make rolling through the darkness if we all kept quiet enough to hear it. The lights of the condominium complex shone. They were not far away. Still, they looked almost too real and close to touch. They were like holes punched in the night, leaking light from another, more animated world. For a moment I could imagine what it would be l..
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Michael Cunningham |
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43237c1
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Morning, Peter," she calls from the back, in her exaggerated German accent. Mawning, Pedder. She's been in the States more than fifteen years now, but her accent has gotten heavier. Uta is a member of what seems to be a growing body of defiantly unassimilated expatriates. She on one hand disdains her country of origin (Darling, the word "lugubrious" comes to mind) but on the other seems to grow more German (more not-American) with every pas..
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Michael Cunningham |
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7402c7a
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There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
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Michael Cunningham |
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a74cd0d
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Taka se pravi. S'zdavash si b'deshche ot tova, s koeto razpolagash v momenta.
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Michael Cunningham |
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c12f64f
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Mensen zijn dom. Op een trommel slaan om een beer aan het dansen te krijgen, terwijl we de sterren zouden willen ontroeren.
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Michael Cunningham |
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b23712b
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Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing.
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Michael Cunningham |
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1eac3a8
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My little girl, oh, the daughter I never had. Now tell me, angel, are you fucking anybody new?
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Michael Cunningham |
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41b701c
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He'll be successful, finally, this coming Sunday, at the modest ceremony to be held in the living room. It's all so clear. Tyler will write a beautiful, meaningful song. Barrett will find a love that abides, and work that matters. And Liz. Liz will tire of boys, tire of her resolution to grow into a tough, colorful old woman who lives defiantly alone.
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Michael Cunningham |
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17cc441
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I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
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Michael Cunningham |
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d05e881
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There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock garden, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into.
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Michael Cunningham |
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4a058a7
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She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street.
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Michael Cunningham |
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d95086f
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La mente puesta en la carne es muerte, pero la mente puesta en el espiritu es vida y paz.
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Michael Cunningham |
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71a177a
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Muzu Ti rict o holkach jedno tajemstvi? Ne. Maji rady, kdyz jsi na ne hodny. Prekvapilo by te, jak daleko se se spoustou holek dostanes, kdyz k nim proste prijdes a reknes: Podle me jsi skvela; podle me jsi krasna. Ony totiz vsechny maji strach, ze nejsou.
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Michael Cunningham |
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bab0489
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Parents are the mystified criminals, blinking in the docks, making it all the worse for themselves with every word they utter.
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Michael Cunningham |
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24d2967
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Without rich people who want it done now, who would animate the free world? In theory, you want everyone to live peacefully according to their needs, along the banks of a river. In fact, you worry that you'd die of boredom there. In fact, you get a buzz from someone like Carole Potter, who keeps prize chickens and could teach a graduate course in landscaping; who maintains a staff of four (more in the summers, during High Guest Season); a h..
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Michael Cunningham |
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1712557
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kogato pogledna k'm novata kniga v'rkhu noshchnoto shkafche, postavena v'rkhu knigata, koiato dov'rshi snoshchi, tia avtomatichno protegna r'ka k'm neia, siakash cheteneto be neinoto nai-vazhno zad'lzhenie prez denia i edinstveniia prilozhim nachin da os'shchestvi prekhoda ot s'nia k'm zad'lzheniiata.
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Michael Cunningham |
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11ca8d7
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a full week of their mother's quiet fury over the fun they don't seem to be having and their father's dogged attempts to provide it...
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Michael Cunningham |
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eb706eb
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It helps, of course - let's not get carried away - if you'er a young prince like Mizzy, and you've actually got something of value to destroy in the first place.
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Michael Cunningham |
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738c3a0
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There is something exciting about this. Peter still doesn't want to have sex with Mizzy, but there is something thrilling about downing a shot of vodka with another man who happens to be naked. There's the covert brotherliness of it, a locker-room aspect, the low, masculine, eroticized love-hum that's not so much about the flesh as it is about the commonality. You, Peter, as devoted as you are to your wife, as completely as you understand h..
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Michael Cunningham |
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bb50e76
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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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34f9647
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Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy's Tony Lamas do to you? There's a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go from your own fiefdom, the more ludicrous are your haircut, your clothes, your opinions, your life. Within easy walking distance of home are neighborhoods that might as well be in Saigon.
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Michael Cunningham |
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2524f67
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Die young, stay pretty. Blondie, right? We think of it as a modern phenomenon, the whole youth thing, but really, consider all those great portraits, some of them centuries old. Those goddesses of Botticelli and Rubens, Goya's Maja, Madame X. Consider Manet's Olympia, which shocked at the time, he having painted his mistress with the same voluptuous adulation generally reserved for the aristocratic good girls who posed for depictions of god..
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Michael Cunningham |
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bcb36a3
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The Harrises, on the other hand, have always been constant talkers, not so much for the sake of entertainment or information but because if a silence caught and held for too long they might have fallen into a bottomless sullen discord, a frozen mutual quietude that could never be broken because there never had been and never would be a shared topic of sufficient reviving urgency (not at least one either of his parents could bear to broach),..
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Michael Cunningham |
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5ac6e3c
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Peter's mother was grand, in her way. She managed to complain almost ceaselessly without ever seeming trivial or kvetchy. She was regal rather than crotchety, she had been sent to live in this world from a better one, and she saved herself from mere mean-spiritedness by offering resignation in place of bile - by implying, every hour of her life, that although she objected to almost everybody and everythng she did so because she'd presided o..
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Michael Cunningham |
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0a578ec
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I know a conquistador when I see one. I know all about making a splash. It isn't hard. If you shout loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all the noise is about. It's the nature of crowds. They don't stay long, unless you give them reason.
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Michael Cunningham |
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6e28a18
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It seems good enough; parts seem very good indeed. She has lavish hopes, of course--she wants this to be her best book, the one that finally matches her expectations.
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Michael Cunningham |
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1b0115c
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Mizzy has wandered into the garden. Carole looks contemplatively at him, says, "Lovely boy." "My wife's insanely younger brother. He's one of those kids with too much potential, if you know what I mean." "I know exactly what you mean." Further details would be redundant. Peter knows the Potters' story: the pretty, unstoppable daughter who's tearing through her Harvard doctorate versus the older child, the son, who has, it seems, been undone..
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Michael Cunningham |
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5e3d5f0
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Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation.
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Michael Cunningham |
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cb9d371
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And so, he knows. He wants, he needs, to do the immoral, irresponsible thing. He wants to let this boy court his own destruction. He wants to commit that cruelty. Or (kinder, gentler version) he doesn't want to reconfirm his allegiance to the realm of the sensible, all the good people who take responsibility, who go to the right and necessary parties, who sell art made of two-by-fours and carpet remnants. He wants, for at least a little whi..
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Michael Cunningham |
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a9cb652
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And yet, it gives Peter nothing. Not now. Not today. Not when he needs... more. More than this well-executed idea. More than the shark in the tank meant to frighten, more than the guy on the street meant to say something pithy about celebrity. More than this.
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Michael Cunningham |
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ce63c03
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The world is full of Guses--good-looking boys and girls who've been dealt the best possible genetic hand by parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who have been doing neither well nor badly for generations; who engender these decent kids and give them just enough to survive in the world but no more--no spectacular beauty, no uncontainable brilliance, no kingly, unstoppable ambition. Isn't it the task of art to acclaim these people,..
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Michael Cunningham |
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eb157ec
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Utter objectivity...is not only impossible when judging literature, it's not exactly desirable. Fiction involves trace elements of magic; it works for reasons we can explain and also for reasons we can't. If novels or short-story collections could be weighed strictly in terms of their components (fully developed characters, ; original voice, ; solidly crafted structure, ; serious theme, ) they might satisfy, but they would fail to encha..
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Michael Cunningham |
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b0dadf2
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Gus the driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthelme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus's but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of a Wal-Mart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor...
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Michael Cunningham |
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6503108
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Rank telepedett a csond, az a fajta jotet hallgatas, amely idorol idore megszakitja idegenek hetkoznapi beszelgeteset, es lehetove teszi, hogy baj nelkul visszaterjenek eletuk ismeros keretei koze.
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Michael Cunningham |
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e74893a
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There are two of you now. Neither is sufficient unto itself, but you learn, over time, to join your two halves together, and hobble around. There are limits to what you can do, though you're able to get from place to place. Each half, naturally enough, requires the cooperation of the other, and you find yourself getting snappish with yourself; you find yourself cursing yourself for your clumsiness, your overeagerness, your lack of considera..
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Michael Cunningham |