The End of Michelangelo

Reading the poetry of Dan Gerber, we are summoned to this larger truth: Though we live in fraught times, on the tipping point of human self-destruction, we and our planet are still very much alive.

In one of his last sonnets, nearly five hundred years ago, Michelangelo Buonarroti confronted the paradox of our earthly existence: “Why beauty mixed with terror, feeds so strangely my desire.” Reading The End of Michelangelo, we are similarly reminded that the very fact of being alive—experiencin...