I loved this NY Review of Books profile of Susan Sontag, a hero of mine (her book On Photography was intrumental in writing my masters thesis on Weegee and had the secondary bonus of changing my whole life) who always intimidated me a bit. I'd heard she was a snob and had little patience for those not as smart as her (just about everyone). But I'd never thought where that aura came from until I read this piece.
"My greatest dream was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people," said Sontag of her childhood in Arizona, which I suppose was a relatable goal in the 1940s for a Jewish kid from out west. Four decades later, this Jewish kid from the middle west dreamed of writing scripts for LA Law. But now the idea of making a living, neigh an identity, as someone who writes and thinks, who dwells in the entrepreneurship of ideas, seems closer now. Sontag may still dwell on my private Mt. Olympus, but now I see stairs climbing upward and not just clouds.
Still, I wasn't prepared for this concluding paragraph...
The quintessential cosmopolitan, there was something provincial in her unabashed idolatry of the great, in her need—though she railed against American consumerism—to consume every book, play, opera, ballet and dance performance, or art exhibit she thought worth reading or seeing. A sign of boundless energy—the jacket of At the Same Time reproduces a scrap from her notebooks, which reads: "Do something. Do something. Do something."—but, one also suspects, a sign of a certain insecurity, as though she still needed to prove that she had arrived and that she was the best informed in the room.
In my circles, we call that FOMO or Fear of Missing Out. It comes not from needing to be the smartest but the most often on hand, of not being the schmuck who watched Grey's Anatomy while the world's greatest party went down. I've learned the hard way this consigns you to a long string of two minute conversations and shallow experiences. We can't be everywhere. Trying becomes more about the challenge rather than the result requires a kind of ruthless "entertain me, me, me" self-centeredness that doesn't work for me and isn't how I chose to live.
Perhaps all people who think and comment for a living are in an information race they can't possibly win. The attempt is by definition doomed so trying is either masochism, insecurity or endless gorging on impossible challenges. My vote is for the first two.
In the end, I think I have the most to learn from Sontag as an essayist rather than a thinker. Our interests overlap only slightly. I hadn't heard of 90% of the writers Sontag devoted her life to exploring. But her clear, intelligent prose, exhaustive research and mustang-like curiousity is something I have much to learn from and can only hope to reach someday.
A Prairie Home Companion (2006): "How you best say goodbye to the people you love is dictated by how you best lived with them."
Notes: Sweet, sad, and perfect as Robert Altman's last film. I once heard an interview where he said "I always saw making a movie as a good excuse to gather a group of friends" or something like that. Now I see what his attachment to PHC was, a repretory company surrounding a benevolent father figure in the truest sense. Just as it's difficult to imagine to imagine public radio without Garrison Keillor, I never thought there wouldn't be another Robert Altman movie. Keillor will be gone someday to, we all will. It's why this movie ends, quiet and beautiful, with these lines.
There’s a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar;
For the Father waits over the way
To prepare us a dwelling place there.
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.
Infrequent updates of what I'm up to...
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles edited and compiled by Jeff Martin. Essay by me on page 45.
