Sontag says

Just finished reading Susan Sontag’s At the Same Time (Penguin), a collection of the last essays and articles she wrote before her death in 2004. I have always preferred Sontag’s essays to her fiction and this collection certainly has some first-class material. There is an examination of American politics and nationalism in the wake of 9/11; photography and, of course, much of interest pertaining to literature. The editors have gathered together a number of her acceptance speeches for literary awards and these are of particular value as they are very accessible for the general reader like me; they were written with a literate – rather than academic – audience in mind and, as such, are very readable.

While I am loath to implode Sontag’s writing into a Northern cul-de-sac, I can not resist posting two little sections which seem to echo concerns here. The first is from an essay On Courage and Resistance, given on receiving the Oscar Romero Award, an award named after the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered while celebrating Mass. Sontag writes:

“To fall out of step with one’s tribe; to step beyond one’s tribe into a world that is larger mentally but smaller numerically – if alienation or dissidence is not your habitual or gratifying posture, this is a complex, difficult process.

“It is hard to defy the wisdom of the tribe: the wisdom that values the lives of members of the tribe above all others. It will always be unpopular – it will always be deemed unpatriotic – to say that the lives of the members of the other tribe are as valuable as one’s own.

“It is easier to give one’s allegiance to those we know, to those we see, to those with whom we are embedded, to those with whom we share – as we may – a community of fear.”

The second extract is from The Conscience of Words and seems very relevant to this little corner of the globe too:

“What do we mean, for example, by the word “peace”? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean a forgetting? Do we mean a forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor? It seems to me that what most people mean by “peace” is victory. The victory of their side. That’s what “peace” means to them, while to others peace means defeat. [Emphasis by Sontag.]

“If the idea takes hold that peace, while in principle to be desired, entails an unacceptable renunciation of legitimate claims, then the most plausible course will be the practice of war by less than total means. Calls for peace will be felt to be, if not fraudulent, then certainly premature. Peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit. Peace has to be re-settled. Re-colonized…”

Not just one thought for the day but two.