Reborn
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks: 1947-1963
By Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
336 pages
The reading of Susan Sontag’s diaries (the first volume, there will be three), let me with a feeling of deep sadness, not only for her individual wretchedness, but also for most of the secular world that so much of modern thought has produced.
I have been reading the last works of her one time husband who was a brilliant pretentious mess as a person, a great teacher and a deep questioner about the nature of the civilization that the modern quest, to make it new, has lead so many to embrace.
There is a deep awareness in his reiterative last four books, that share the same dryness and lack of joy that fills each page of Sontag.
Jouissance is absent and I continually mused upon Wilhelm Reich as I read Sontag and thought back upon my reading of Rieff.
On Sontag’s part: an intellectual focus on art and thought that feels totally disembodied as do so many of the joyless Protestant/Jewish moments that make up so much of modern culture, no matter how thrilled I’ve been to immerse in them.
Rieff has done something lasting. Defined a cultural moment and a new personality type – the therapeutic mentality – and perhaps in doing so not given Susan, his ex-wife, enough credit for the work her precocious intellect contributed to the major that helped gain him a preferment – a chair – at my alma mater.
She will fade quickly, a minor figure in a minor cultural movement. An emblem, perhaps of the sterility that intellect breeds when a culture has died and its civilized moment is proclaiming its brittle end.
Occasionally an orgasmic squeak arises from these dry, sterile pages, but the lack of real release, the inability to transcend screamed at me as I reviewed my reading lists transcribed from her diaries and recalled my trips to New York to see ten movies in three days and though of my often reading of days with just short breaks to eat and sleep, but in my “Bohemian” world there was also joy and delight in food, nature and the body of the other: an immersion in the physical that was often for days with breaks to eat and sleep, but I liked my partners and we got off.
Jouissance, joy, pleasure, happiness.
Gone missing and certainly not to be found in Reborn.
Sad, sad, sad, alas!
