On Self
On Self
By SUSAN SONTAG, The New York Times, September 10, 2006
The most prominent New York intellectual of her generation, Susan Sontag appears, to a reader of her journals, to have filled every idle moment with a notation. She wrote in steno pads and City College spiral-bound notebooks, hardcover journals and even on loose sheets of paper. This churning of life and thought could be found tucked away here and there in the many-roomed apartment at 24th Street and 10th Avenue where she spent her last years; she died on Dec. 28, 2004, shortly before what would have been her 72nd birthday.
Sontag’s interest in traditional journal-keeping — with dated entries and considered sentences — was episodic. There are outbreaks of diary writing, though more typical are lists: of movies seen, books to read, places to eat and drink in the cities that interested her; and of words, usually English words but sometimes words and phrases in French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish. There are lists of notable writers, poets or painters of a particular moment, all jotted with the meaningful intensity of a student, an intensity she kept throughout her life.
In certain periods, she traces every detail of her private life with anxious care; in other periods, close relationships seem hardly to have been noted. Exploratory passages of novel-writing further blur the line between private drama and literary or intellectual narratives. Seen in the light of her accomplishments and celebrity, Sontag’s life seems to have an admirable coherence. Her public persona was durable and unmistakably hers. But in the journals, the effort of it appears again and again: the reworking of the life and ideas, the total concentration, along with the excitement she felt when things were finally going well. She often meditates on this constant self-construction, and indeed some aspects of her life — the mixing of high and low culture, the sexual enthusiasm, the passionate intellectualism — would become, beginning in the 1960’s, hallmarks of the Downtown life.
The selection here begins at the end of 1958, when Sontag is about to turn 26. Her marriage to Philip Rieff had grown troubled, and with a one-year fellowship to study abroad, she planned to settle in Oxford, England, but went instead to Paris.
( Read More )
By SUSAN SONTAG, The New York Times, September 10, 2006
The most prominent New York intellectual of her generation, Susan Sontag appears, to a reader of her journals, to have filled every idle moment with a notation. She wrote in steno pads and City College spiral-bound notebooks, hardcover journals and even on loose sheets of paper. This churning of life and thought could be found tucked away here and there in the many-roomed apartment at 24th Street and 10th Avenue where she spent her last years; she died on Dec. 28, 2004, shortly before what would have been her 72nd birthday.
Sontag’s interest in traditional journal-keeping — with dated entries and considered sentences — was episodic. There are outbreaks of diary writing, though more typical are lists: of movies seen, books to read, places to eat and drink in the cities that interested her; and of words, usually English words but sometimes words and phrases in French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish. There are lists of notable writers, poets or painters of a particular moment, all jotted with the meaningful intensity of a student, an intensity she kept throughout her life.
In certain periods, she traces every detail of her private life with anxious care; in other periods, close relationships seem hardly to have been noted. Exploratory passages of novel-writing further blur the line between private drama and literary or intellectual narratives. Seen in the light of her accomplishments and celebrity, Sontag’s life seems to have an admirable coherence. Her public persona was durable and unmistakably hers. But in the journals, the effort of it appears again and again: the reworking of the life and ideas, the total concentration, along with the excitement she felt when things were finally going well. She often meditates on this constant self-construction, and indeed some aspects of her life — the mixing of high and low culture, the sexual enthusiasm, the passionate intellectualism — would become, beginning in the 1960’s, hallmarks of the Downtown life.
The selection here begins at the end of 1958, when Sontag is about to turn 26. Her marriage to Philip Rieff had grown troubled, and with a one-year fellowship to study abroad, she planned to settle in Oxford, England, but went instead to Paris.
( Read More )