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. A… - Michael Cunningham

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Engraved portrait of Michael Cunningham, facing right

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 expected to feel lucky to have been invited to see them at all.

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About Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons, David Shankbone (CC BY)

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I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.

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One often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturize others. He is the opposite kind of egotist, driven by grandiosity rather than greed, and if he insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be — capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined — it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and for a while after you've left him that he alone sees through to your essence, weighs your true qualities (not all of which are necessarily flattering — a certain clumsy, childish rudeness is part of his style), and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

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