Susan Sontag appreciation
Susan Sontag died today.
I particularly remember her essay about meeting with Thomas Mann after she read The Magic Mountain. She was 14 and a huge fan. She found it difficult to talk to the great man, but observed many things.
“In America” won the National Book Award, but in this book interview Sontag talks about many things that interested her - including illness, an interest that started with Mann but became more personal as time went on.
From The Times's obituary:
Over four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, trendy, iconoclastic, captivating, hollow, rhapsodic, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, abrasive, aloof, attention-seeking, charming, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, mannered, formidable, brilliant, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, challenging, ambivalent, accessible, lofty, erudite, lucid, inscrutable, solipsistic, intellectual, visceral, reasoned, pretentious, portentous, maddening, lyrical, abstract, narrative, acerbic, opportunistic, chilly, effusive, careerist, sober, gimmicky, relevant, passé, facile, illogical, ambivalent, polemical, didactic, tenacious, slippery, celebratory, banal, untenable, doctrinaire, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, aloof, glib, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull.
Eternal youth
Ray Kurzweil invented the first synthesizer that sounded just like a real piano. He believes that computers will soon be smarter than humans. And now he wants to live forever. From The Times today:
“I am serious about it,” said Mr. Kurzweil, a wiry man with few lines on his face for a 56-year-old. “I think death is a tragedy. I think aging is a tragedy. And going beyond our limitations is what our species is all about.”
Kurzweil's suggestions: take a lot of supplements (he takes 250 pills a day), don't eat a lot of carbohydrates or fat, meditate, exercise. Not surprising. But the goal is to live for another 50 years. If you do that, Kurzweil confidently suspects you may be able to live forever, thanks to advances in technology. That's surprising.
There's no limit to the advice you can get on this topic. Eat almost nothing (you'll be irritated, but you'll still be alive). Be Sardinian. Drink a lot of red wine.
Last week I was a guest at a birthday party thrown by the host for himself. He got 180 friends together and sang all evening to us — songs from his past, not songs he had written — and it was really something. It was not pathetic and self-serving, although it easily could have been. It was a great evening. Two guys next to me were grousing about getting older (”it's all downhill, it's so awful“). It seems to me that if you can still sing (or do something else — write software?) and still have some friends around, it might be fine to live forever.
Personally, though, I'm not sure I'm willing to give up on bagels to get there.