#insp: elucidating the difficult to word

[medhareads]

Reading criticism clogs conduits through which one gets new ideas: cultural cholesterol.

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[medhareads]

A constriction in the chest, tears, a scream that feels as if it would be endless if I let it out.

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[medhareads]

Sensibility is humus for the intellect.

There’s no syntax for sensibility—hence, it’s ignored.

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[medhareads]

Modern aesthetics is crippled by its dependence upon the concept of “beauty.” As if art were “about” beauty—as science is “about” truth!

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[medhareads]

Is the being tired a spontaneous complicity with death—a beginning to let go at what one judges to be about the right time, half way?

Or is it objectively so, that one would anyway be tired at 35 and spend the next 165 years [moping around]?

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

Initial piece of thought

[medhareads]

SMELL is the largest sensory area in the brain and also the most primitive Very powerful but not articulated—can’t do anything with it (just naming) All accent, no syntax Smelling gives one a knowledge of sensation rinsed clean of thought (unlike hearing and seeing)

Osmology, as opposed to logology

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[medhareads]

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinion that the other thinks too much.

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[medhareads]

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[medhareads]

Those four years! That huge length of time—its weight, its almost palpable thickness— obsesses me. “How can she …” etc.

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[medhareads]

I will never just outlast this pain. (Healing passage of time, etc.) I am frozen, paralyzed, the gears are jammed. It will only recede, diminish if I can somehow transpose the emotion—as from grief to anger, from despair to assent. I must become active.

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh