Kevin Power at The Dublin Review of Books:
If ever there was ‘an individual who has a high intellectual potential’, Sontag was it. She was reading Thomas Mann aged eleven, matriculated at Berkeley at fifteen and was writing essays of superlative, inspirational elegance and density by her late twenties. Being intelligent – being more intelligent than anyone else – was not just important to Sontag: it was the thing she needed her mosaic to depict. The cultural critic Mark Greif, who knew her late in her life, said that ‘Susan made you acknowledge that she was more intelligent than you. She then compelled you to admit that she felt more than you did.’ Sontag may have ‘felt more’ than other people – certainly, she swore that her life’s work was ‘to see more, to feel more, to think more’. But there is considerable evidence actually that she spent her life refusing to feel – refusing, that is, to feel vulnerable. She had been vulnerable as a child; she never accepted this, and never got over it.
more here.
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