12.28.2004
A respectful, loving note on Susan Sontag:
Sontag used to boast, famously, that she never slept. Her nights, she insisted, were spent reading European philosophy or American political commentary, Peyton Place or Roland Barthes.
A friend of mine had the pleasure of spending a weekend with Sontag as a guest of a mutual friend of theirs who lived in Philadelphia. Sontag was an intense interlocutor, he said. She was smart, funny, and a delight. Over dinner, she made her boast about never sleeping; instead, she read.
The dinner party broke up. All headed to their beds.
About 2 AM that morning, my friend padded down the hall to use the bathroom. The door to Sontag's bedroom was open, her light burning. Three or four books were spread on the bed. Sontag was deep asleep, her head propped on the head board--a copy of Kant across her lap. She was loudly snoring.
'Night, Susan. Rest well.
1 Comments:
But my greatest delight in Sontag came after 9/11 when she was the first writer to speak truth to power with her statement in the New Yorker that "Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." This was the week after the attack! And it preceeded Bill Maher's identical comment (the one that got Politically Incorrect cancelled) by months. While everyone on the left and right was cringing in horror and terror, Sontag was shooting from the hip, calling the sanctimony and sabre-rattling and talk of an "end to irony" to be "unworthy of a mature democracy." She was fearless, and she was usually right.
Joel
