- "There is only one thing I dread; that my sufferings will not be worthy of me." - Sontag
Her prose smells of the seminar room, packed with quotations, epochal pronouncement, authoritative claims on history, consciousness, art. Sontag is an enthusiast but not, properly speaking, a popularizer; she writes for the initiate, not the naif. The seduction of her sentences is their hardness and authority; they could never be accused of a light touch. She wears her learning like chain mail.
Funny that such an exhaustive moral authority on the documented sufferings of others could be unbearably oppressed by the most casual assertions of other minds. In conversation once, Walker Percy explained to her that to get to her to his house, she should "take the Pontchartrain Bridge-26 miles-straight as a string." Percy's mind interrupts her own; she wants to be left alone to see what she wants to see: "I'm visualizing the bridge, the plantation house, the bayou, the moss-covered trees. Suddenly there's this damned string!..."
| Susan Sontag aka | The Dark Lady of American Letters |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Novelist, Essayist |
