Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit)
Susan Sontag on art, in illustrated diary excerpts, also available as a limited-edition print benefiting A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women artists and writers.
Susan Sontag
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Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint. … Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist’s, like Kierkegaard’s—was Simone Weil’s.
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No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.
Susan Sontag reviews Simone Weil’s Selected Essays in the very first issue of The New York Review of Books, 1963.
Susan Sontag on attention, boredom, and art.
Most of the interesting art of our time is boring.
Susan Sontag on the creative purpose of boredom as a form of attention.
Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts— it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure— and the most sensual.
Oh, where is the out-going freedom, the instrumental freedom from, freedom that is not this enormous possession of one’s own heart which is death?
18-year-old Susan Sontag on life, death, art, and freedom
The most precious thing is vitality … the will + energy + appetite to do what one wants to do + not to be ‘sunk’ by disappointments. Aristotle is right: happiness is not to be aimed at; it is a by-product of activity aimed at —
[Susan Sontag’s son] David is in love. ‘She’s being Greta Garbo today.’ When one is romantically in love, the other usually is Garbo.
Susan Sontag in diary entry, March 26, 1980.
The great Greta Garbo would’ve been 107 today.
I know the future is open and unpredictable. My style, though, is to want to close it — to make it predictable… I am so very much more cool, loose, adventurous in work than in love.
Fro the department of insanely exciting news: After a barrage of requests, those illustrated quotes by Susan Sontag on love are now a gorgeous limited-edition large-scale print by artist Wendy MacNaughton. 100 signed and numbered copies on heavy cotton rag paper with deckled edges.
Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
23-year-old Susan Sontag writing in her diary shortly before the dissolution of her own marriage
The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.
My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.
Flannery O’Connor responds to a school teacher’s odd take on A Good Man Is Hard to Find, offering some timeless broader insight on storytelling and interpretation in the process.
Susan Sontag put it even more forcefully: “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling… Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.”
