'Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics...', |
I found this quotation (see below) - by the magnificent Susan Sontag - on the brilliant Brainpickings Website which provides insights from all kinds of writers and writing. I turn to Brainpickings when I need something inspiring to spur me on in my life and my writing. Take a look at Brainpickings
My favourite phrase here is ‘I choose not to be a futilitarian.’ Being somewhat depressive I have to avoid the company of negative people, whom I shall now - following Susan Sontag - call futilitarians.
'… the great question-dynasty: … if we are
continually inadequate in love, uncertain in decision, + impotent in the face
of death, how is it possible to exist?’' Then says ...
'...Yet we do exist, + affirm that. We affirm
the life of lust. Yet there is more. One flees not from one’s real
nature which is animal, id, to a self-torturing externally imposed conscience,
super-ego, as Freud would have it– but the reverse, as Kierkegaard says. Our
ethical sensitivity is what is natural to man + we flee from it to the beast;
which is merely to say that I reject weak, manipulative, despairing lust, I am
not a beast, I will not to be a futilitarian. I believe in more than the
personal epic with the hero-thread, in more than my own life: above multiple
spuriousness + despair, there is freedom + transcendence. One can know worlds one has not experienced,
choose a response to life that has never been offered, create
an inwardness utterly strong + fruitful.'