Some lines from the first two volumes of Susan Sontag's diaries

.



From Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963




I am not myself with people […] but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.


*


The world is cluttered with dead institutions.


*


Life is suicide, mediated.


*


There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions. I am thinking now of what I read today (when I went up to 122 Boulevard Saint-Germain to check for her mail) in Harriet’s journal about me – that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concluded by her saying that she really doesn’t like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune. God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated. We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us)… Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal. Will Harriet ever read this?


*


Harriet said something very striking yesterday, apropos of Sam W.’s enormous library, that collecting books in that way was “like marrying someone in order to sleep with him.”

True…

Use libraries!!


*


Inspiration presents itself to me in the form of anxiety.


*


I told her tonight she is always putting me in the position of saying “I’m sorry.”

She told me to go read a sex manual. 


*


From As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980




A miracle is just an accident, with fancy trappings.


*


One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinion that the other thinks too much.


*


If I can’t bring judgement against the world, I must bring it against myself.

I’m learning to bring judgement against the world.


*


Every act is a compromise (between what one wants + what one thinks is possible.)


*


Ivan searching for a reply to something I said: “Wait… I can taste it but I can’t yet find the words.”


*


I suspect now that lusting after the good isn’t what a really good person does.


*


Thoreau on his death bed – on being asked what were his feelings about the next world: “One world at a time.”


*


The extraordinary frequency with which the plot of a serious contemporary novel turns on, or resolves itself, by a murder – compared with the extreme unlikelihood that the educated writers of vanguard fiction have ever been anywhere near a murder in their lives.



.