Susan Sontag has shaken off the white, Western, capitalistic coil and made her way to the happy hunting grounds of liberalism. We who are left must reckon with her legacy.
This won’t take long.
A woman of great intellectual curiosity and horsepower, she symbolized the chaotic and undisciplined age which made a celebrity of her. The fact that she often dropped literary names has somehow obscured the fact that she had in fact read everything in the Western canon and everything worth anything beyond that. From Chicago and Harvard here to Oxford and the Sorbonne in Europe, she earned the right to profit by the greatest minds the world has known, yet she subjected her intellect to her sentiments and chose to spew artful vitriol at Western civilization. This she did with zeal from her comfortable home in New York amid the highest accolades that the despised civilization had to bestow. Her copious mental zeal was somehow expended across 71 years without maturing into a coherent worldview. It is no crime to change one’s mind, but it is a shame to have never held a deep conviction that could withstand the slightest scrutiny. This is the fate of anyone who denies ultimate truth as a concept. Her intellectual sojourn is as admired by educated liberals as it is to be feared by educated recovering liberals.
May she rest in a peace she never knew in this world despite is accessibility.