by Susan Sontag
If you don’t want to look at the painting, look at me.
See the sign? You can’t take the boat that way. We’re getting near the nuclear-submarine base.
Reports. Five cases of cholera have been reported.
This piazza has been called a stage for heroes.
It gets much cooler at night. You have to wear a sweater.
Thanks to the music festival every summer. You should see this place in the winter. It’s dead.
The trial is next week, so now they’re having demonstrations. Can’t you see the banner? And listen to that song.
Let’s not. I’m sure it’s a clip joint.
They said. Sharks, I think they said.
Not the hydrofoil. I know it’s faster, but they make me sick.
“The sun having mounted and the heat elsewhere too extreme for us, we have retired to the tree-shaded courtyard.” It’s not that I loved him. But in a certain hour of physical fatigue …
At the mercy of your moods.
Contented sometimes. Even blissful.
Doesn’t sound like it. Sounds like struggling to savor.
Maybe. Loss of judgment in the necropolis.
Reports. There’s a civil war raging in the north. The Liberation Front’s leader is still in exile. Rumors that the dictator has had a stroke. But everything seems so—
Calm?
I guess … calm.
This spot. On this spot they massacred three hundred students.
I’d better go with you. You’ll have to bargain.
I’m starting to like the food. You get used to it after a while. Don’t you?
In the oldest paintings there is a complete absence of chiaroscuro.
I feel well here. There’s not so much to see.
“Below the molding, small leafy trees, from which hang wreaths, ribbons, and various objects, alternate with figures of men dancing. One man is lying on the ground, playing the double flute.”
Cameras. The women don’t like to be photographed.
We may need a guide.
It’s a book on the treasures they unearthed. Pictures, bronzes, and lamps.
That’s the prison where they torture political suspects. Terror incognita.
Covered with flies. That poor child. Did you see?
Omens. The power failure yesterday. New graffiti on the monument this morning. Tanks grinding along the boulevard at noon. They say. They say the radar at the airport has been out for the last seventy-two hours.
They say the dictator has recovered from his heart attack.
No, bottled water. Hardier folk. Quite different vegetation.
And the way they treat women here! Beasts of burden. Hauling those sacks up azure hills on which—
They’re building a ski station.
They’re phasing out the leprosarium.
Look at his face. He’s trying to talk to you.
Of course we could live here, privileged as we are. It isn’t our country. I don’t even mind being robbed.
“The sun having mounted and the heat elsewhere too extreme for us, we have retired to the shade of an oasis.”
Sometimes I did love him. Still, in a certain hour of mental fatigue …
At the mercy of your moods.
My undaunted caresses. My churlish silences.
You were trying to mend an error.
I was trying to change my plight.
I told you, you should have taken me along instead.
It wouldn’t have been different. I went on from there alone. I would have left you, too.
Mornings of departure. With everything prepared. Sun rising over the most majestic of bays (Naples, Rio, or Hong Kong).
But you could decide to stay. Make new arrangements. Would that make you feel free? Or would you feel you’d spurned something irreplaceable?
The whole world.
That’s because it’s later rather than earlier. “In the beginning, all the world was America.”
How far from the beginning are we? When did we first start to feel the wound?
This staunchless wound, the great longing for another place. To make this place another.
In a mosque at Damietta stands a column that, if you lick it until your tongue bleeds, will cure you of restlessness. It must bleed.
A curious word, wanderlust. I’m ready to go.
I’ve already gone. Regretfully, exultantly. A prouder lyricism. It’s not Paradise that’s lost.
Advice. Move along, let’s get cracking, don’t hold me down, he travels fastest who travels alone. Let’s get the show on the road. Get up, slugabed. I’m clearing out of here. Get your ass in gear. Sleep faster, we need the pillow.
She’s racing, he’s stalling.
If I go this fast, I won’t see anything. If I slow down—
Everything. —then I won’t have seen everything before it disappears.
Everywhere. I’ve been everywhere. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
Land’s end. But there’s water, O my heart. And salt on my tongue.
The end of the world. This is not the end of the world.
by Susan Sontag
FICTION
The Benefactor
Death Kit
The Way We Live Now
The Volcano Lover
In America
ESSAYS
Against Interpretation
Styles of Radical Will
On Photography
Illness As Metaphor
Under the Sign of Saturn
AIDS and Its Metaphors
Where the Stress Falls
FILM SCRIPTS
Duet for Cannibals
Brother Carl
PLAY
Alice in Bed
A Susan Sontag Reader
I, ETCETERA. Copyright © 1963, 1965, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1978 by Susan Sontag. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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E-mail: [email protected]
The author wishes to acknowledge the publications in which these stories first appeared. “Debriefing” and “Old Complaints Revisited” appeared in American Review; “Project for a Trip to China” in The Atlantic; “The Dummy” in Harper’s Bazaar; “Unguided Tour” in The New Yorker; “American Spirits” (originally titled “The Will and the Way”) and “Doctor Jekyll” in Partisan Review; and “Baby” in Playboy.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sontag, Susan, 1933–
I, etcetera / Susan Sontag.—1st Picador USA ed.
p. cm.
Contents: Project for a trip to China—Debriefing—American spirits—The dummy—Old complaints revisited—Baby—Doctor Jekyll—Unguided tour.
ISBN 978-0-312-42010-9
I. Title.
PS3569.O6547 12 2002
813'.54—dc20
2001058079
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First Picador USA Edition: March 2002
eISBN 9781466853553
First eBook edition: August 2013
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