Is it wrong that I waste prayers* on the subject of keeping my eyesight until I die, so someday when I'm really old and retired and my children don't visit me, I can at least spend all my time reading? Because I actually have a list of authors whose entire lists I'd love to read, but who I just don't have the proper time for right now?
Susan Sontag is one of those authors. I've always found her really interesting, even though I've only read snippets of her work. I tried to read On Photography once, but it was a bit over my head. Whenever I see her novels in used bookstores, I think about trying one of those, too, but I never do. I am also fascinated by her relationship with Annie Leibovitz, which was at least partially chronicled in Leibovitz's photography collection A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 (Leibovitz's photographs of Sontag after her death from cancer in 2004--she was 71 years old--are some of the most simultaneously beautiful and saddest I've ever seen). The two also collaborated on a work published in 2000 and titled simply Women.
The book I had home this week, and which I won't get enough time to read (add it to the "retirement list") was Regarding the Pain of Others. I'm not sure where I got the idea to check it out; recently I indexed a book about World War I posters and war photography, which led me to look into broader issues of the pictorial depictions of wars, and I must have stumbed across it sometime during that (I'm guessing). This is how it begins:
"In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Written during the preceding two years, while she and most of her intimates and fellow writers were rapt by the advancing fascist insurrection in Spain, the book was couched as the very tardy reply to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London who had asked, 'How in your opinion are we to prevent war?' Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For though they belong to the same class, 'the educated class,' a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is 'some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting' that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy." (p. 4.)
That, to me, is an opening that promises a very interesting book. And I love Sontag's prose; it's crisp. She's got a way with description (I love the image of Woolf observing "tartly"), and even when her sentences require a bit of deciphering on my part**, she's expressing complex thoughts as succinctly as really is possible.
*I know it's wrong. I try to throw a few prayers at the problem of world peace at the same time to make up for my selfish personal needs.
**Think on this one a while: "The destructiveness of war--short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide--is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong--wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, 'The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,' violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing." (p. 12.) That's a sentence I need a few days with.
Told my mother the other week that I'd kill myself if I ever lost my eyesight. She said she understood. I wasn't exaggerating. Neither was she.
Possibly it sounds morbid but I'm just being honest about things. No reading = no reason to keep on going.
Posted by: lesbrarian | 09 October 2009 at 09:35 AM
that's pretty incredible. i find her fascinating. i've never read anything complete by her, but have heard snippets of her reading essays, etc. i recently purchased this for our library and will have to check it out if only to read bits here and there. http://www.amazon.com/Reborn-Notebooks-1947-1963-Susan-Sontag/dp/0312428502/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255099149&sr=8-5
i'm going to be thinking about that sentence all day now. total destruction=suicide, victims of violence=things. that's seriously mind-searing.
Posted by: Beth | 09 October 2009 at 09:40 AM
If the Lord let's me keep my eyesight, I promise to read aloud to all the other little old people in the nursing home.
Posted by: Melanie | 09 October 2009 at 10:06 AM
Regarding the Pain of Others is a brilliant book - do try to find some time :-) I've never read anything else of hers, but now I'm inspired to go find more of her stuff!
Posted by: Laura | 09 October 2009 at 10:51 AM
Oh, Lesbrarian,
I'm totally with you. And no, listening to books all the time is not the same.
Beth, see what I mean? And it's a whole book of sentences like that. Wild stuff, man.
Melanie:
Awesome. How nice of you to throw in an incentive for your prayers to be answered. I didn't even think of offering a trade; very smart--and nice--of you.
Laura,
I will try. I do want to get it back; and I'm going to get "Women" for the pictures in the meantime.
Posted by: Citizen Reader | 10 October 2009 at 01:46 PM
Regarding the Pain of Others is the only book of hers I've read completely, too, but I, also, would like to read more. O for world enough and time!
Posted by: laura | 20 October 2009 at 11:40 AM
Laura,
I'm so impressed that so many people have read this book! I remember that I tried Sontag's famous book about photography, but I didn't understand most of it. Perhaps I just didn't take enough time. I'm with you: for world enough and time!
Posted by: Citizen Reader | 22 October 2009 at 11:34 AM