“I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired.”
“Each time that one (that I) surrender to one’s vanities, each time that one thinks and lives for the sake of ‘appearing,’ one betrays…It is not necessary to deliver oneself to others, but only to those whom one loves. For then it is no longer delivering oneself in order to appear, but only in order to give. There is much more force in a man who appears only when he must. To go to the end, that means to know how to guard one’s secret. I have suffered from being alone, but in order to have kept my secret, I conquered the suffering of being alone. And today, I know no greater glory than to live alone and unknown.”
— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963 [Undated]
The rarest of the rare! Photos of Susan Sontag and her girlfriend, Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes. If the dates on the back are accurate, Susan would have been around 28 years old.
These were taken by Morton “Morty” Schleifer (Walter Kerell’s brother) and posted to LiveJournal by the user personalist in 2010.
Susan Sontag critiquing the homophobia and misogyny of Fidel Castro’s government in Conducta Impropria/Inappropriate Conduct (1984, Dir. Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal)
This was filmed 15 years after she wrote the optimistic essay “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for us) to Love the Cuban Revolution.” A classic example of her shifting opinions; though one might argue that this isn’t a flip-flopping on Sontag’s part, but a response to a regime that flip-flopped.
“For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.”
Regarding Susan Sontag, aims to paint a portrait of the revered woman in a way that is both empathetic and honest, that reveals the living, breathing woman behind those courageous and incisive words. While Sontag’s legacy lies in words, it was the images that so captivated her and drew from her such fertile ideas.
In quite literally showing Sontag through archival photographs and film footage, Regarding Susan Sontag pays tribute to her powerful—if conflicted—love affair with images. Writes Kates in conversation with Feature Shoot, “We tried to make it visually compelling, both to underscore her ideas and the process of thinking and writing, and because she deserved it in some way.”
Our September preview showcases stories of familial dysfunction from the brilliant Natalia Ginzburg and Susan Taubes. The beloved Italian author considers the strained relationships between parents, children, and siblings, while Taubes’s Divorcing, out of print for over fifty years, takes up the collapse of a marriage and a sense of self.
Sophie Blind is divorced—and not merely from her husband but from herself, as her own memories and emotions seem increasingly remote. In luminous fragments, the narrative flits from New York to her childhood home of Budapest, considering her parents’ divorce alongside her own. Fans of Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick, take note: this dreamlike novel from 1969 is a forgotten precursor to their lyrical work in the ’70s. Taubes, a close friend of Susan Sontag, committed suicide at forty-one soon after its publication.
From the celebrated author of Family Lexicon comes these two novellas of dysfunctional family life. In Valentino, a sister tells the story of her doted-upon brother, who upends his family’s expectations when he suddenly marries an ugly but wealthy older woman and begins a secret affair with her male cousin. In Sagittarius, a daughter and her hypercritical mother move to the suburbs, where she becomes obsessed with impossible dreams of opening an art gallery.
“I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired.”
