“I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me,” she commented. “I intend to do everything … to have one way of evaluating experience — does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful — I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it, too, for it is everywhere!” In an especially revealing passage, she then went on to comment, “I am alive … I am beautiful … what else is there?”
The publication this month of the first volume of Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a significant event in the literary world. The book gives us more fully than ever the mind and sensibility of one of the 20th century’s finest writers at work during her formative years. It provides compelling insights into the worlds (and underworlds) that she successively inhabited…read the complete review in The Chronicle Review ‘I am alive… I am beautiful.. what else is there?’ photo of Sontag by Jill Krementz