Susan Sontag’s List of Rules and Duties for Being 24

“Don’t criticize publicly anyone at Harvard.”

The second published volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980, gave us the celebrated author and thinker’s insights on love (now available as a limited-edition print!), writing, censorship, and aphorisms. But the first installment, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (public library), is in many ways even more fascinating, as we see a young Sontag begin to take shape as a private person and a public intellectual.

Immediately before turning 24 on January 16, 1957, Sontag produces the following list, a blend of the pragmatic and the aspirational:

Rules + duties for being 24

1. Have better posture.
2. Write Mother 3 times a week.
3. Eat less.
4. Write two hours a day minimally
5. Never complain publicly about Brandeis [University] or money.
6. Teach [SS's toddler son] David to read.

Then, several weeks later, Sontag resolves:

DON’T

1. Criticize publicly anyone at Harvard –
2. Allude to your age (boastfully, mock-respectfully, or otherwise)
3. Talk about money
4. Talk about Brandeis

DO

1. Shower every other night
2. Write Mother every other day

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An Institution Committed to the Dulling of the Feelings: Susan Sontag on Marriage

“Marriage is based on the principle of inertia.”

“My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all,” wrote Charles Darwin as he weighed the pros and cons of marriage before committing himself to the love of his life, with whom he had ten children.

Earlier this month, artist Wendy MacNaughton illustrated Susan Sontag’s meditations on love, culled from the author’s journals between 1964 and 1980 — a stirring blend of cynical disillusionment and romantic idealism. To get there, Sontag had passed through a turbulent youth of crashing against the walls of her sexual identity and eventually marrying Philip Rieff at the tender age of seventeen after a ten-day courtship. In the first installment of her published diaries, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (public library), edited by Susan and Philip’s son David Rieff, a 23-year-old Sontag shares this grim antidote to Darwin’s optimistic take on spousal union as she grapples with the dissolution of her own marriage to Philip — a kind of painful separateness bespeaking the opposite of the limbic revision that happens between two souls connected in a healthy, loving relationship.

On August 12, 1956, she writes:

In marriage, every desire becomes a decision

She revisits the subject on September 4:

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.  

Quarrels eventually become pointless, unless one is always prepared to act on them — that is, to end the marriage. So, after the first year, one stops ‘making up’ after quarrels — one just relapses into angry silence, which passes into ordinary silence, and then one resumes again.

Then, in an entry dated November 18, 1956, Sontag puts down the outline for an intended essay on marriage:

A Project — Notes on Marriage

Marriage is based on the principle of inertia.  

Unloving proximity.  

Marriage is all private — no public — behavior.  

The glass wall that separates one couple from another.  

Friendship in marriage. The smooth skin of the other.  

[Protestant theologian Paul] Tillich: the marriage vow is idolatric (places one moment above all others, gives that moment [the] right to determine all the future ones). Monogamy, too. He spoke disparagingly of the “extreme monogamy” of the Jews.  

Rilke thought the only way to keep love in marriage was by perpetual acts of separation-return.

The leakage of talk in marriage.
(My marriage, anyway.)

Sontag and Philip separated shortly thereafter and permanently divorced in 1958. She never completed the “Notes on Marriage” essay, though many of the ideas teased out in Reborn were eventually fully explored in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays.

Also from Sontag’s diaries, her thoughts on censorship and aphorisms, and her synthesized advice on writing.

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Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts

“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”

HAPPY UPDATE: We’ve released a sequel, Susan Sontag on art, with proceeds benefiting A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women writers and artists.

The recently released volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library), is a treasure trove of insight — on writing, on censorship, on aphorisms — from the deepest corners of one of the greatest minds in modern history. But besides her extraordinary intellect, what made Sontag a force of nature was also her complex and ever-evolving emotional perception, brimming with extreme self-awareness and keen reflection on her relationships with others.

I sieved Sontag’s journals for her most poignant, most private meditations on love — candid, vulnerable, hopeful, hopeless — and asked artist extraordinaire Wendy MacNaughton (♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥) to hand-letter and illustrate them exclusively for Brain Pickings. Enjoy.

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 is superb and revealing in its entirety — impossible to recommend enough.

HAPPY UPDATE: After countless requests, we’ve made available a limited-edition 8″x26″ high-quality print of the artwork on heavy cotton rag paper with deckled edges, signed and numbered. Enjoy.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.