What I've Been Reading

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag. Trust me on this - some precious gems can be found if you have the patience to skim through her personal rambling and will also set a better platform to read the second book of this trilogy which is brilliant.

• That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e., Honesty. 
• Let me note all the sickening waste of today, that I shall not be easy with myself and compromise my tomorrows.
  What is important in life is life and not a result of life. 
• Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, always have been, and always will be, men and only men.
• I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination.
• 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. Quarrels eventually become pointless, unless one is always prepared to act on them— that is, to end the marriage. So, after the first year, one stops “making up” after quarrels— one just relapses into angry silence, which passes into ordinary silence, and then one resumes again.
  In saying love is arbitrary I mean it is experienced as arbitrary. It is perfectly obvious, of course, that it is conditioned by suppressed longings, images, etc., etc.
• Religion doesn’t appease anxiety but awakes anxiety.
• To be presented to my great grandchildren, on my golden wedding anniversary? “Great Grandma, you had feelings?” “Yeh. It was a disease I acquired in my adolescence. But I got over it.”
• I don’t care if it’s lousy. The only way to learn how to write is to write. The excuse that what one is contemplating isn’t good enough.
• The most precious thing is vitality— not in any sinister [D. H.] Lawrentian sense, but just 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—
• Intending to name my dog Lad.
• In marriage, I have suffered a certain loss of personality— at first the loss was pleasant, easy; now it aches and stirs up my general disposition to be malcontented with a new fierceness.
• If I thought about nothing else but logic, I think I could be good at it. But it demands such a “sacrifice of the intellect,” paradoxical as that may seem
• For theory of language:   Limit of thought = language. Language is link between sensations + the world.
• Morality informs experience, not experience informs morality.
• Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. 
• My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
• Idea of an afterlife, including hell, demanded by religious teleology? Moral bookkeeping requires a settling of accounts. Some enterprises prosper, others are judged bankrupt or fraudulent or both— and there must be penalties + rewards, for life is serious. It’s easy to see how the virtue of justice, + the arts + scruples of judging, go with a serious attitude toward life— less easy to see that charity is serious, because so much of behavior which is objective [sic] charitable stems from indifference and an incapacity for moral indignation.
• My ambition— or my consolation— has been to understand life. (Mistaken idea of the spirituality of a writer?) Now I want simply to learn to live with it.
• Being in love— this subtle keen unforgettable sense of the other’s uniqueness. There is no one like her, dances like her, is sad like her, is eloquent like her, is foolish and vulgar like her …
• I hardly think except when I’m talking. That’s why I talk so much.   And that’s why I don’t write.
• Don’t be kind. Kindness is not a virtue. Bad for people you’re kind to. It’s to treat them as inferiors, etc.
• It is true that: “It is raining outside.” “Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan.” + these statements are true statements because it is, Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan. Introspection will never get you these results.
• The reason most things look better once bought and out of the store— even on the bus ride home— is that they have already begun to be loved.
• The writer must be four people: 1. The nut, the obsédé 2. The moron 3. The stylist 4. The critic 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.   A great writer has all 4— but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2; they’re most important.
• Memory is the test. What one wants to remember— while still in the act or experience— is corrupt.
• Problem of the emotions is essentially one of drainage.   The emotional life is a complex sewer system. Have to shit every day or it gets blocked up.   Need 28 years of shitting to overcome 28 years of constipation. Emotional constipation the source of Reich’s “character armor.” Where to begin? Psychoanalysis says: by an inventory of the shit. It dissolves under continued—continued— eventually humorous— gaze.