"I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag, largely because I met the great [mathematician] Benoit Mandelbrot on the same day. It took place in 2001, two months after the terrorist event of September, in a radio station in New York. Sontag, who was being interviewed, was piqued by the idea of a fellow who "studies randomness" and came to engage me. When she discovered that I was a [stock market] trader, she blurted out that she was "against the market system" and turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, just to humiliate me (note here that courtesy is an application of the Silver Rule), while her assistant gave me a look as if I had been convicted of child killing. I sort of justified her behavior in order to forget the incident, imagining that she lived in some rural commune, grew her own vegetables, wrote with pencil and paper, engaged in barter transactions, that type of stuff.No, she did not grow her own vegetables, it turned out. Two years later, I accidentally found her obituary (I waited a decade and a half before writing about the incident to avoid speaking ill of the departed). People in publishing were complaining about her rapacity; she had squeezed her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for what would be several million dollars today for a novel. She shared, with a girlfriend, a mansion in New York City, later sold for $28 million. Sontag probably felt that insulting people with money inducted her into some unimpeachable sainthood, exempting her from having skin in the game."
Susan Lee Sontag was an American writer and critic. She primarily wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), the short story "The Way We Live Now" (1986) and
"Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."
Susan Sontag"One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling... which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking."
Susan Sontag"A curious word, wanderlust. Im ready to go. Ive already gone. Regretfully, exultantly. A prouder lyricism. Its not Paradise thats lost. Advice. Move along, lets get cracking, don’t hold me down, he travels fastest who travels alone. Lets get the show on the road. Get up, slugabed. Im clearing out of here. Get your ass in gear. Sleep faster, we need the pillow. Shes racing, hes stalling. If I go this fast, I wont see anything. If I slow down — Everything. — then I wont have seen everything before it disappears. Everywhere. Ive been everywhere. I havent been everywhere, but its on my list. Lands end. But theres water, O my heart. And salt on my tongue. The end of the world. This is not the end of the world."
Susan Sontag"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is."
Susan Sontag"If America is the culmination of Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation."
Susan Sontag"Dont be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable."
Susan Sontag"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"