Susan Sontag’s journals: corrupted by gossip, self-righteousness and misanthropy, as any honest diary should be. She had a fierce intellect, but seemed to lack ordinary grace and goodwill. Alas, this was not her vocation: to be nice. Nor mine. I can’t help now but to begin excavating her tome of one-liners as potential epitaphs. Which of these would look best on my tombstone:
“Nothing exists unless I maintain it.”
“The nightmare is that there is only one world: this one.”
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” (quoting Wittenstein)
“So much in modern life that can be enjoyed, once one gets over the nausea of the replicate.”
“There is no greater corruptor than the word of God.”
“Solitude is endless. A whole new world. The desert.”
“I live inside a deep pain.”
“It’s over—just as suddenly, mysteriously, arbitrarily, unpredictably as it began.”
“My idolatry: I lusted after goodness.”
“Residue of childhood…”
“The important part of the dream is the analytic statement, not the narrative resolution.”
“Scholastic definition of time as the actualization of possibilities.”
“Underneath the depression, I found my anxiety.”
“Have I done all the living I’m going to do?”
Awesome of the day: Sufjan’s Tumblr.
