#Susan Sontag

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Information will never replace illumination,” Susan Sontag prophesied shortly before her death, before the birth of the social media newsfeed, as she considered the conscience of words and writer’s responsibility to society. A generation earlier,

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Between those happenings that prefigure it / And those that happen in its anamnesis / Occurs the Event, but that no human wit / Can recognize until all happening ceases,” W.H. Auden wrote in considering the selective set of remembrances and

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is,” Susan Sontag asserted in considering the conscience of words. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her splendid meditation on the magic of real

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Time and reason are functions of each other,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her philosophical novel exploring why honoring the continuity of past and future is the wellspring of moral action. The human animal is indeed a temporal creature, our

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1964. “Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.” I have thought about Sontag’s prescience again and again in my decade-plus on