Reads tagged with “Susan Sontag”

15-Year-Old Susan Sontag on the Explosive Elasticity of the Self
“All that animates me and is the original and responsive desire that constitutes my ‘self’ — all this takes on a definite shape and size — far too large to be contained by the structure I call my body.”

Being Against Becoming: Susan Sontag on Our Ambivalent Historical Conscience
“We understand something by locating it in a multi-determined temporal continuum. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.”

Great Writers on the Letters of the Alphabet, Illustrated by David Hockney
A choral serenade to the building blocks of language starring Susan Sontag, Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, Martin Amis, Doris Lessing, John Updike, and more titans of literature.

Aristotle’s Aperture: An Animated History of Photography, from the Camera Obscura to the Camera Phone
…and how a greedy attitude to intellectual property made the camera’s primary competitor perish.

Susan Sontag on Selfies, Selfhood, and How the Camera Helps Us Navigate Complexity
“There is a dialectical exchange between simplicity and complexity, like the one between self-revelation and self-concealment.”

Romanian Philosopher Emil Cioran on the Courage to Disillusion Yourself
“The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths.”

Oliver Sacks on the Three Essential Elements of Creativity
“It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled.”

The Conscience of Words: Susan Sontag on the Wisdom of Literature, the Danger of Opinions, and the Writer’s Task
“A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine… The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.”

Susan Sontag on How Photography Mediates Our Relationship with Life and Death
“We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably.”

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