I, Etcetera

by Susan Sontag

  I was almost eighteen when I met my second member, a professor at the university where I was enrolled. Long before knowing anything about him, I was drawn to Cranston. He wore three-piece suits with leather elbow patches and had a peculiarly arrogant manner on the lecture platform, for which, with the pathos of youth, I admired him. He was balding fast. Though at the time he must have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine, he looked to be in his early forties at least. This internationally acclaimed expert in his abstruse field came from a poor and uneducated family of butchers, dressmakers, and cops. Years of near-starvation, while he was putting himself through college and graduate school by his own efforts, had left him extremely thin. And when, through a classmate’s gossip, I found out that he was a member, I thought I’d divined the secret of his austerity and dedication.

  Of course, I didn’t immediately dare bring my personal interest in the organization to Cranston. I was shy. And I wanted to offer him something more serious than curiosity. Before approaching him, I read up on the history of the organization. Being uninitiated, I understood little of what I’d read; but on the basis of that, I proposed doing a term paper on the organization’s tenets of belief in the early nineteenth century. Cranston’s assistant reluctantly approved my topic. The next step was to get to see Cranston himself, no easy matter, since he always hurried away after his lectures. I tried to devise a suitable question I might put to him—I mean, a question that was neither distasteful in its ignorance nor impertinent in its maturity.

  “Would you agree that the reason the organization’s members cluster together is not snobbery or clannishness but to be able to aid each other in the most difficult circumstances?” I blurted out at Cranston in the corridor one day after class. My pretext was still that paper for his course. “We preach a universal brotherhood,” he replied drily. I’d been rebuffed, and I respected him for that. I came at him again, undiscouraged, a week later. This time I’d typed out a list of questions, which I thrust into his hands. “All this for a term paper?” he said, frowning. He had long, thin fingers with beautiful pale, tapering nails.

  “Not exactly, sir,” I said. “It’s really more of a personal interest. And I thought that since you … I mean, I’ve heard that you…”

  I suppose another reason I was drawn to the organization (I should mention them all) is that my mother so disapproved of my joining. It was all right for my aunt to marry George, she was no bigot, etc.—so she said. I knew that it was because she had never liked any of her in-laws. Convinced that she’d married down in settling for my father, she thought it fitting for her husband’s sister to marry even further down, by choosing George; but not for her spoiled, precocious only child—who was going to be a great writer—to get mixed up with that tawdry, suspect, clannish crew. And besides, it was dangerous. Weren’t some of their activities illegal? I enjoyed defying her; at last she had a reason to worry about me. (I’d been a far too docile child.) Years later, she herself became a member. This embarrassed me.

  I could see, to my surprise, that Cranston had taken a sudden liking to me. He seized my elbow awkwardly. “What’s your name?”

  Cranston invited me to his one-room apartment near the university, and started to make some instant coffee on the hot plate. Then the cord broke. We talked for several hours that day, the first of many conversations. He took down rare leather-bound books from the seventeenth century and showed them to me. (One was called Oceania.) How flattered I was! Here was a man such as I had imagined members of the organization to be—dignified, articulate, reserved, yet (nobody can hide that sort of thing) inflamed with a great passion.

  I hadn’t yet met the type of member, all too common, who becomes ashamed of belonging to the organization, and conceals it.

  Cranston smiled—for what that was worth. His almost-handsome, skeletal head was handsomer when he didn’t smile; when he did, you noticed that he had trouble with his gums. He started to tell me a little about the organization. Unlike my uncle, Cranston didn’t boast of his affiliation with the movement. His remarks were detached, factual. To him, I was still an outsider, and he wasn’t interested in proselytizing. I sat in a broken armchair, spellbound by his sense of purpose, and longed to share in what inspired him.

  * * *

  I’d better pass over the stages of my entry into the organization, for I feel myself sliding back into the mood of grateful reverence that brought me into it. Since I’m trying to assemble my reasons for leaving, I should be explaining these—and perhaps, in the telling, fortify my resolution.

  I suppose the main reason is that, despite the close camaraderie that membership supplies, I do feel isolated. It’s difficult to explain, for there are members all around me, and from the organization I have drawn friendships, love affairs, professional contacts, and, nine years ago, a marriage. I’m never alone. Although our movement is numerically very small, no more than the tiniest fraction of the world’s population—in many places the organization has never gained a foothold—it often seems to me that the world is populated only by members. Everywhere I go, and I’ve traveled on three continents, I meet them. Perhaps this is a delusion, part of the special mentality, the unique way of looking at the world, that one adopts upon becoming a member—a kind of protective myopia conferred by initiation. How often has it happened that when I strike up a conversation with a stranger whom I assume to be a nonmember (never, I must admit, without the definite awareness that he is not one of us, an awareness that sometimes heightens our intimacy but often inhibits it), my new acquaintance turns out to be a member. Perhaps he’s concealing it, for reasons of personal convenience, or because he fears some new persecution is afoot.

  Or perhaps he is a lapsed member—at any rate, one who has stopped paying dues and attending meetings. But even so, I can’t help treating him as a member in full standing. For it’s one of the peculiarities of our movement that while we are (or claim to be) scrupulous in screening candidates and admitting new members, we never regard someone as really having left. Even after expulsion, disgraced members are kept track of. They are watched carefully and with a certain solicitude.

  Once I asked the organizer why the movement remains so attached to its former members. Sentimentality? “We’re well rid of the disaffected,” I said, “the ones who no longer contribute anything to us.” It would be better, I argued, to have clear standards of misbehavior and reliable procedures for severance—as marriage, also a permanent and binding contract, is compatible with the possibility of getting a divorce.

  This conversation took place four years ago, before I was aware of feeling anything other than pride in the organization. The old man had just recovered from his first heart attack; I was polishing my translation of his third collection of polemics. Now it occurs to me that my questions were not disinterested: that I was pleading, in advance, for myself—for the possibility of my own exit.

  I’m not saying it’s not possible to be thrown out of the organization. It is. But only after committing definite, public, and outrageous acts. Some hold that joining another organization is sufficient grounds for expulsion. For others, it’s moving to a country where there are no members—not even a small cell, an embryonic branch. (A minority consider this second tantamount to the first.) Others would expel anyone who denounces the organization or reveals its secrets to nonmembers—while remaining notably indulgent toward indiscretions that don’t carry beyond the movement’s roster. Still, one can’t commit any of these treasonable acts with certainty that expulsion will result. On many occasions, the organizer has surprised rebellious members by his leniency. That’s one reason—not the only one, of course—why I still hesitate to take any particular step. It would be easier if there were precedents to guarantee that at least some steps I might take would have consequences.

  You’ve noticed, I hope, that I’m digressing. The reasons why it’s difficult for me to leave are not identical with the reasons that prompt me to leave; and it’s those I want to explain.

&
nbsp; I mentioned the sense of isolation from which I suffer, despite the nourishing proximity of members all around me. I can’t describe this isolation more accurately than by saying that I have a keen sense of being cut off. But from what? After only twelve years of belonging to the movement, I hardly remember what it was like not to belong. Understand, I’m not denying for a moment the advantages and strenuous privileges of membership. But I know that I lost something upon joining, something I probably couldn’t ever recover if I left, for the organization leaves its mark on you (our teachers proclaim), and besides, I am twelve years older, no longer exactly young. I have, probably, given the best years of my life to the movement.

  To be fair, I must explain that the organization makes no secret of the sacrifices demanded of its members (quite apart from the risk of martyrdom—never quite real to me, since I’m a citizen of a country mercifully untempted, so far, by such a crime). “Merit through suffering” is one of the organization’s slogans, which every applicant is instructed to ponder. (“Deeper and deeper into the books” is another, more obscure slogan, which is studied by some members only, at a later stage of initiation.) Still, I think the organization does minimize some of the sacrifices that membership entails. We are exhaustively instructed about the world’s disfavor and about the high moral demands that the organization’s traditions make upon the members. But no word about the rest of our sacrifices. Have these been overlooked in the discussions? Or concealed? I think not. (Whatever my other complaints, I’m not accusing the leadership of hypocrisy or bad faith.) No, I think that most of our presidents, along with the rank and file, are not even aware of them. The bitterest truth of all.

  I mean, for example, the narrow mode of living that membership fosters. Although our movement was founded by recluses living in underpopulated regions, it has appealed almost exclusively to inhabitants of large cities. It’s as if dry solitude, as in the desert, had been necessary to formulate the ideal or have the experiences that gave birth to the movement, but damp crowding, as in city life, is needed to perpetuate it.

  The elevator has broken down again, so Lee will have to walk up sixteen flights of stairs. The dog has stopped barking in the next apartment. Our neighbors are cooking dinner. Someone nearby is practicing the violin, accompanied by a reckless piano tuner.

  Our members vacation in the country, and occasionally live in barns. But they rarely feel at home there. They dislike working the land, or exploiting nature for purposes of pleasure. In part, this may be explained by the organization’s rule (more a tradition, really) of nonviolence. But it’s not only hunting and fishing—as well as farming and raising animals—that members abjure. All sports, involving as they do an intolerable degree of thoughtlessness and yielding to the body, are, as it were, instinctively avoided by most of us. Members who do go out for football or hunt foxes or sail or parachute-jump or race stock cars or dance the tango or grow wheat seem to be engaged in some astounding, unconvincing, laborious affectation.

  And yet it’s not instinct. For these same persons once—at least as children—boxed and rode horseback and played tennis as freely as anyone else. It’s the style of character produced by membership (more by example, through contact with other members, than by explicit rule) that results in these aversions. The proof is that we’re even proud of our incapacities; we learn to retort, “That’s for the others.”

  It’s the same with the food preferences shared by many of our members. Undoubtedly, when they were young, future members ate spinach and brussels sprouts and cabbages just like everyone else. But after joining, most turn up their noses when a plate of such stuff is placed before them. “Grass,” they sneer. I can vouch for the fact that it’s not because of some old superstition about the color green—one of the sillier beliefs about us held by nonmembers. Nor is it a lingering religious taboo. The reason we’re a meat-eating group who shy away from vegetables is that we associate a herbivorous diet with mental dullness. And yet, as if to compensate for this aversion, members have a tendency to overeat, and our meals in common are often festive.

  Have you noticed that the reproaches leveled against us, even when justified, are quite contradictory? Some say we’re dirty; others that we’re neurotically clean. (Members will rarely leave a sink full of dirty dishes.) Some say we’re priggish; others that we are too sensual. (We love food. We admire sex.) That’s the genius of the organization: that we are at once so dispersed and so unified, so similar and so disunited. Only this way, probably, could we have survived so many persecutions.

  Well, you may say, go to the country then. Lie in the sun, tan your pale body, do calisthenics, commit adultery, scuba dive, ride a motorcycle, raise dogs, eat lettuce. But it’s not so simple. I do, I do many of these things—without being ostentatious about them in front of other members. But they remain exotic to me. I feel I lack permission. And even if I could give permission to myself, something is wrong as long as I need permission.

  Unfortunately, I’ve never gone off to the country without taking my typewriter along. I always have such a backlog of work.

  Even more stupid than not wholeheartedly enjoying the rural and the carnal is performing these things on principle, with effort. (Effort should be reserved for the struggle to elevate one’s mind and perfect one’s principles.) Still, I continue discreetly to pursue my pathetic projects. I’ve started a garden on our apartment-house roof, where—despite the polluted air—I manage to grow string beans.

  When I arrived at my mother’s apartment last Saturday, she was absorbed in a book about the war. Her eyes were bloodshot; she rubbed them frequently. I felt prosperous, healthy, at ease with myself. “You were always a bit stuffy,” she muttered. “That’s why the organization appealed to you.” She looked down at her arthritic hands. “We’re full of well-meaning prigs.” I didn’t mind her insults, if they made her feel better. And I marked that “we.”

  “Listen,” she said, putting down the book. “There’s another organization.” I think her speech was slurred. “What?” I exclaimed. “You heard me,” she said.

  “You mean one of the rival groups?” I asked cautiously. “No, I mean another one like ours,” she muttered. “But more enlightened. You’d like that one better.” She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. “I’m not shopping,” I said, almost gaily. The terror was underneath.

  If only I could commit a crime, and be done with it.

  Members in this country have started watering down the rules. If there have to be rules, I prefer them to be stricter.

  * * *

  Perhaps I should say something about the structure of the movement. We have a loose hierarchy, with an organizer in each locality where members are numerous. Members in some countries use the Central Committee system; in others, they elect a president. There’s no written constitution. Attempts to set up a permanent international headquarters were abandoned generations ago as too risky, and it’s customary to hold the annual conference of organizers in a different country each year. The most striking evidence of our lack of centralization are the several schismatic groups who continue to call themselves chapters of the organization, and whose adherents (who insist on calling themselves members) send a sizable annual contribution for the upkeep of the central archives. And there is the long-rumored existence of entirely secret chapters, such as a sect in southern India that compiled its own anthology of quotations and Commentaries. Besides the academy for training advanced members, the only regular institution in each locality is a court. The duties of the court (which is composed of ten senior members) require that it convene whenever a persecution of the movement seems imminent, to draw up plans for safeguarding the members’ lives and properties. The decisions of the court, when it functions in the usual, judicial sense, don’t require a unanimous vote. I might explain that nothing is ever unanimous in the society.

  The court also screens candidates for membership and supervises the education of new members. At the court of the local branch, disciples a
nd counterdisciples of the old man hold frequent classes on our history and teachings. (He is housebound now, because of his illnesses and because he is preparing another book.) After a lecture, the class is thrown open to discussion. The movement has traditionally placed great faith in lengthy and free debate. Members are not a particularly quarrelsome lot. At least, the quarrels practically never lead to physical violence. But we are notorious among outsiders for being word-drunk and loquacious. Our weekly meetings, scheduled to break off at midnight, often go on until three in the morning. After a meeting is adjourned, a few members can usually be found outside, continuing the discussion until dawn.

  Are these discussions a device whereby we perpetuate ourselves? In my twelve years of belonging to the organization, I don’t remember that anything has ever been decided at a meeting. Words with us seem to be ends in themselves. We spend altogether too much time talking.

  Perhaps that’s why the bodies of most members strike me, now, as underdeveloped; why so many of us who inhabit northern climates exhibit an uncommon sensitivity to the cold, and often seem a bit overdressed alongside nonmembers. When I see the members standing outside the meeting hall in the early hours of the morning, the steam rising from the manholes in the empty streets, disputing some fine point in the discussion, I see them in my mind’s eye mostly in turtleneck sweaters and long overcoats—whatever the season.

  Perhaps I exaggerate.

  In the tropical country to which I imagine moving with Lee, we could complain all the time about the heat. Our daughter would grow up a familiar of piranhas. She would swim naked with village children in the local stream. She would sleep under mosquito netting. I would sweat over my typewriter; and when it broke down there would be nobody to repair it. Lee would be out in the bush, dispensing quinine pills and treating scabrous infants and examining the feet of water carriers for jungle rot. Every few weeks I would take a raft downriver to the nearest post office to send off my proofs or collect a small check for the last book or receive a new manuscript—perhaps in a language studied in college but from which I’ve never before translated.