Chekhov's Mistress
One Last Word on Sontag
These things tend to get a bit overdone, but I just read Christopher Hitchen’s obit on Susan Sontag for Slate and it’s quite good (link via Beatrice).
He talks about her as an intellectual, but I think more importantly, he talks about her activism, which was at times controversial:
It’s hard to think of any other American author or intellectual who would be as sincerely mourned as Susan will be this week, from Berlin to Prague to Sarajevo. (Updated, Dec. 31: On Thursday, Mayor Muhidin Hamamdzic of Sarajevo announced that the city will name a street after her, and the city’s Youth Theater said that it would mount a plaque for her on its wall.)
Mention of that last place name impels me to say another thing: this time about moral and physical courage. It took a certain amount of nerve for her to stand up on stage, in early 1982 in New York, and to denounce martial law in Poland as “fascism with a human face.” Intended as ironic, this remark empurpled the anti-anti-Communists who predominated on the intellectual left. But when Slobodan Milosevic adopted full-out national socialism after 1989, it took real guts to go and live under the bombardment in Sarajevo and to help organize the Bosnian civic resistance. She did not do this as a “tourist,” as sneering conservative bystanders like Hilton Kramer claimed. She spent real time there and endured genuine danger. I know, because I saw her in Bosnia and had felt faint-hearted long before she did.
Her fortitude was demonstrated to all who knew her, and it was often the cause of fortitude in others.
I think these are ultimately the things to be remembered for.
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: January 04, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
