I would have loved to have had the chance to pull up a chair beside Susan Sontag. On a cafe terrace somewhere, we'd sit, drink coffee and talk about literature, history, politics, photography and the life of the mind. I'd probably find myself asking about Warhol, her experience of the Sixties, and her relationship with Annie Leibowitz. Slowly, I've been reading At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007). Published posthumously, with a foreword by her son, this work gathers together sixteen speeches and essays written in the last years of Sontag's life.
'On Courage and Resistance' (The Oscar Romero Award Keynote Address) and 'At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning', (The Nadine Gordimer Lecture) are the two which most impressed themselves upon me. I can't put into words their effect, nor reproduce the fluency and passion of these works with quotation. But they impressed themselves. To these words I will, I suspect, return.
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These are a few of the remarks I'd like to remember:
"We live in a world that is, in several important respects, both mired in the most banal nationalisms and radically post-national." (165)
I love the economy of her summation.
"There is an old riff I've always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student of philosophy (as I was once myself), late one night, who had been struggling through Kant's abstruse account in his Critique of Pure Reason of the barely comprehensible categories of space and time, and decided that all of this could be put much more simply.
It goes as follows:
'Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once...and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.'" (214)
I was doing likewise a few works ago: coming to Kant for the first time, so I like this riff.
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"One might suppose that in the twentieth century, in the age of genocide, people would not find it either paradoxical or surprising that one can be so indifferent to what is happening simultaneously, elsewhere. Is it not part of the fundamental structure of experience that 'now' refers to both 'here' and 'there'? And yet, I venture to assert, we are just as capable of being surprised - and frustrated by the inadequacy of our response - by the simultaneity of wildly contrasting human fates as was Voltaire two and a half centuries ago. Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the sheer simultaneity of events - by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That here we are here, now prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening...while elsewhere in the world, right now..in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio...
To be a traveler - and novelists are often travelers - is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world, and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned 'home'.
It is a beginning of a response to this painful awareness to say: it's a question of sympathy...of the limits of the imagination. You can also say that it's not 'natural' to keep remembering that the world is so...extended. That while this is happening, that is also happening.
True.
But that, I would respond, is why we need fiction: to stretch our world." (228)
And that is why I turn to Sontag: she stretches mine.
