An amazingly fast and revealing read from one of the generation’s greatest thinkers and storytellers. With her son David’s editing prowess, we skip through the beating subconscious underneath some of her greatest work: it’s fascinating the hear the inner turmoil, the greater questions, the doubts and heartache and befuddlement that she kept running up against in her early career. Though this set of journals was markedly before the notoriety and fame that would come with the seventies, her incredible attention to detail and prosaic exploration carries the seeds of the philosophy and societal commentary she would be known for.
Particularly, I found her compulsion with Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood to be interesting: she returns to it again and again, especially in the way it explicates and handles and weaponizes love. I am tempted to reread it, if only to further contextualize Sontag’s later “Against Interpretation” and “Where the Stress Falls”, if not others. For whatever reason, I think it articulates for her something about the relationship between the heart and the body, the mind and the heart, how one is inseparable from the other, how one cannot control either. I think Nightwood might have served as a kind of metonym for this idea for Sontag, something she maybe was unwilling to confront with her own prose. Which, fair enough. But I’m speculating.
A facet of her work that is incredibly clear in these journals is her unification of the sacred and the profane— in realizing the innate impulse artists, as well as (she would argue) everyone, has toward unity and Wholeness and our aversion to division, especially when it comes to the body. She would publish one of her magnum opus regarding this very topic three years after this set of journals end.
A fascinating read, if a little voyeuristic at times.

Essentials:

“It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”

“Alone, alone, alone. A ventroloquist’s dummy without a ventriloquist. I have brain-fatigue and heart-ache. Where is peace, the center?"

“If this love is hopeless, there is no use reviling oneself— suffer it, let consciousness of its manifest grotesqueness help it to pass.”

“Life is suicide, mediated. […] The private life, the private life. Struggling to float my pieties, idealisms. All statements not to be divded into true + false. This can be done, trivially. But then the meaning is mostly bleached out. Being self-conscious. Treating one’s self as an other. Supervising oneself. I am lazy, vain, indiscreet. I laugh when I’m not amused. What is the secret of suddenly beginning to write, finding a voice? Try whiskey. Also being warm.”

“Short cut: don’t call sex sex. Call it an investigation (not an experience, not a demonstration of love) into the body of the other person. Each time one learns one new thing. Most Americans start making love as if they were jumping out of a window with their eyes closed."

“In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather— in many cases— offers an alternative to it.”

“My ‘I’ is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egoists, even to the point of fatuity. Sane me, critics, correct them— but their sanity is a parasitic on the creative faculty of genius.”

“To be defensive invites, incites the other person to offend. Remember! X looks abjectly-lovingly at Y; Y is irritated by mounting self-reproaches, which are resented as being undeserved; therefore Y feels compelled to be brutal to X. Sadism, hostility as essential element in love. Therefore it’s important that love be a transaction of hositlities. Lesson: not to surrender one’s heart where it’s not wanted."