September 11, 2006
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Sontag's Sermon
continued from yesterday"My image of myself since age 3 or 4-- the genius-schmuck. I allow one to pay off the other. Develop relationships to satisfy principally one or the other....
Sartre (cf. 'Les Mots') the only other person I know of who had this 'certainty' of genius. Living already a posthumous life, even as a childhood. (The childhood of a famous man.)
A kind of
suicide-- with the 'work' of genius you know you'll do when adult your tombstone. The most glorious tombstone possible. Sartre was very ugly-- and knew it. So he didn't have to develop 'the schmuck' to pay off the others for being 'the genius.' Nature had taken care of the problem for him. He didn't have to invent a cause of failure or rejection by others. As I did, by making myself 'stupid' in personal relations. (For 'stupid,' also read 'blind.')"
-- Susan Sontag in The New York Times Magazine yesterday
Meanwhile, back at MIT:
Doonesbury 9/11
Related material
from MIT's School of
Humanities, Arts,
and Social Sciences
(SHASS),
"'For the modern post-religious man,' Susan Sontag wrote in a 1961 essay, 'the religious museum, like the world of the modern spectator of art, is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship.'"
-- "The Moralist," by Scott McLemee, The Boston Globe, July 16, 2006
The last words from the people in the towers and on the planes, over and over again, were 'I love you.' Over and over again, the message was the same, 'I love you.' .... Perhaps this is the loudest chorus from The Rock: we are learning just how powerful love really is, even in the face of death."
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