How to Live Like Susan Sontag / Emily Temple. In: Lit Hub January 16, 2019

Free self-improvement idea for 2019: become Susan Sontag. Listen, it’s not as hard as it sounds. If you watch all of her favorite films, indulge in all of her likes, avoid all of her dislikes, subscribe to her belief systems, adhere to her reading list, and follow her instructions for life, well, you’ll basically have done it. And either way, you might have a very interesting year.
The easiest way to start such an undertaking is, of course, with Sontag’s lists. She was a famously prodigious listmaker; her journals are full of them (though her son, who edited Sontag’s journals before they were published, cuts some longer lists off partway through). In a journal entry dated August 9, 1967, she explains her affinity for the bulleted form:

I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create—or guarantee—existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.

Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.

Relatable! If you too want to take all of knowledge as your province, or just want to know how much smarter than you Sontag was as a teenager, you can start here. Let me know how it goes.

Beliefs This is the very first entry in Sontag’s earliest published journal, dated November 23, 1947

I believe:

(a) That there is no personal god or life after death

(b) That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e., Honesty

(c) That the only difference between human beings is intelligence

(d) That the only criterion of an action is its ultimate effect on making the individual happy or unhappy

(e) That it is wrong to deprive any man of life

[Entries “f” and “g” are missing.]

(h) I believe, further more, that an ideal state (besides “g”) should be a strong centralized one with government control of pulic utilities, banks, mines + transportation and subsidy of the arts, a comfortable minimum wage, support of disabled and age. State care of pregnant women with no distinction such as legitimate + illegitimate children.

To Read from Sontag’s journals, December 19, 1948 (NB: she’s 15)

There are so many books and plays and stories I have to read—Here are just a few:

The Counterfeiters—Gide The Immoralist—” Lafcadio’s Adventures—” Corydon—Gide

Tar—Sherwood Anderson The Island Within—Ludwig Lewisohn Sanctuary—William Faulkner Esther Waters—George Moore Diary of a Writer—Dostoyevsky Against the Grain—Husmans The Disciple—Paul Bourget Sanin—Mikhail Artsybashev Johnny Got His Gun—Dalton Trumbo The Forsyte Saga—Galsworthy The Egoist—George Meredith Diana of the Crossways—” The Ordeal of Richard Feverel—”

poems of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Tibullus, Heine, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire

plays of Synge, O’Neill, Calderón, Shaw, Hellman . . .

[This list goes on for another five pages, and more than a hundred titles are mentioned.] ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/how-to-live-like-susan-sontag/