Saved by Cassie Barker and
How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think
Right now, at what can feel like a time of moral and political emergency, we cling to sentimental bromides about the importance of art. We treat it as an escape, a balm, a vague set of values that exist beyond the ugliness and venality of the market and the state. Or we look to art for affirmation of our pieties and prejudices. It splits the... See more
A.O. SCOTT • How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think
Is art really that important?
The furor she sparked with a few paragraphs written for The New Yorker after the Sept. 11 attacks — words that seemed obnoxiously rational at a time of horror and grief — had not yet died down.
A.O. SCOTT • How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think
The world often dictates that there is a right way - to think, to feel, to be. To grieve. Perform any of this in deviation from what’s deemed acceptable, and suddenly, you become unacceptable. But what’s the point in living in a time of free speech and an opinion at every corner if what you truly feel can actually find little place in the world?
Viewed with the chastened hindsight of adulthood, their seriousness shows its ridiculous side, but the longing that drives it is no joke. It’s a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience of a particular kind. Two kinds, really: the specific experience of encountering a book or work of art and also the future experience, the state of... See more
A.O. SCOTT • How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think
Begin what? Nobody quite knows. And yet, it makes perfect sense. The logic doesn’t work, but the emotional we all echo.
Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover — moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality — that they would never... See more
A.O. SCOTT • How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think
Susan Sontag in “Camus’ Notebooks”. Just. So worthy of being a card.