by Susan Sontag
During this period of my youth, in the years immediately following my resignation from the university, I took the opportunity to travel outside my native country, and to observe the manners of other peoples and social classes. I found this more instructive than the wordy learning of the university and the library. Perhaps because I never left the country for more than a few months at a time, my travels did not demoralize me. Observing the variety of beliefs in different countries did not lead me to conclude that there is no true right and wrong but only fallible human opinion. However much men disagree about what is forbidden and what allowed, everyone aspires to order and to truth. Truth needs the discipline of custom in order to act. I do not deny that custom is usually narrow-minded and ungenerous. But one has no right to be outraged when, in self-defense, it martyrs the partisans of extreme acts. Any discipline, even that of the most sanctimonious custom, is better than none.
While I was occupied with my initial investigations into what I vaguely thought of as “certitude,” I felt obliged to reconsider all opinions which were presented to me. Consequently I felt entitled to none myself. This openmindedness raised certain problems as to how my life was to be guided for the interim, while I questioned content I did not want to lose form. I drew up, for the duration of this period of inquiry, the following provisional maxims of conduct and attitude:
Not to be satisfied with my own, or any one else’s, good intentions;
Not to wish for others what they did not wish for themselves;
Not to spurn the advice of others;
Not to fear disapproval, but to observe as much as is feasible the rules of tact and discretion;
Not to value possessions nor be distracted by ambition;
Not to advertise myself, nor make demands on others;
Not to wish for a long life.
These principles were never difficult to follow, since they accorded with my own disposition anyway. Happily, I can claim to have observed them all, including the last rule. For although I have had a long life, I have not gone out of my way to provide for it. (I should mention, to give the reader a proper perspective, that I am now sixty-one years old.) And this life, I must also add, I do not recount because I consider it an example to anyone. It is for myself alone; the path I have followed, and the certitude I have found would be unlikely to suit anyone but myself.
The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still. I would describe myself rather as a block of marble, acceptably though crudely hewn on the outside, inside which there is a comely statue. When the marble is hewn away, the freed statue may be very small. But whatever the size of the statue, it is better not to endanger it by moving the marble block frequently.
For this effort of hewing away the marble which enclosed me, no experience, no preoccupation was too small. I found nothing to despise. Take, for example, the group of people collected by Frau Anders. It would have been easy to dismiss them as vain and frivolous. But each of them had some perspective on life which was of interest, and something to teach me—the most satisfying grounds for friendship. Sometimes I wished that Frau Anders were not so solely concerned to please and to be pleased. She could have set herself up as a counter-force to her guests’ pursuit of their own individualities. Then, instead of revolving around our hostess with compliments and attention, we could have spied on her. She might have asked us to perform and to create in her name, which everyone would have refused. She might have forbidden us to do things, like write novels or fall in love, so that we might have disobeyed her. But good manners forbid that I should have asked more of this woman than she was capable of giving. It was enough that the society I found at her house amused me, without arousing in me many expectations.
As evidence of my friendly conduct as a member of this society, I submit the following anecdote. One day Frau Anders asked me if the lack of financial privation in my life did not open opportunities for boredom. I replied, truthfully, that it did not. I then realized that this rich and still handsome woman was not asking me a question but telling me something, namely, that she herself was bored. But I did not accept her discreet complaint. I explained to her that she was not bored; she was, or was pretending to be, unhappy. This little comment instantly lifted her spirits, and I was pleased to see in subsequent visits to the house that she had become quite gay. I have never understood why people find it so difficult to speak the truth to their acquaintances and friends. In my experience, the truth is always appreciated, and the fear of giving offense is greatly exaggerated. People fear to offend or hurt others, not because they are kind but because they do not care for the truth.
Perhaps it would be easier for people to care for the truth if they understood that truth only exists when they tell it. Let me explain. The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is. Thus, to me, my life and my preoccupations are not the truth. They are, simply, my life, my preoccupations. But now I am engaged in writing. And in daring to transpose my life into this narrative, I shoulder the dreadful responsibility of telling the truth. I find the narrative which I undertake a difficult task, not because it is hard for me to tell the truth about myself in the sense of reporting honestly “what happened,” “what took place,” but because it is hard for me to speak the truth in the more pretentious sense, truth in the sense of insisting, rousing, convincing, changing another.
Sometimes I cannot help pursuing various ideas I have of the character and preoccupations of my readers. This weakness I hope to conquer. It is true that the lessons of my life are lessons only for me, suited only to me, to be followed only by me. But the truth of my life is only for someone else. I warn the reader that I shall try henceforth not to imagine who that someone else is, and whether he or she is reading what I have written. This I cannot, and rightly should not, know.
For, to speak the truth is one thing; to write it another. When we speak, we address someone else. When we speak what is best—which is always the truth—still it is to a person, with the thought of a person. But if there is any chance of writing something that is true, it will only be because we have banished the thought of another person.
When we write the truth, we should address ourselves. When in writing we are didactic and admonitory, we must consider that we instruct and admonish only ourselves, for our own failings alone. The reader is a happy accident. One must allow the reader his liberty, his liberty to contradict what is written, his liberty to be distracted by alternatives. Therefore it would be improper for me to try to convince the reader of all that is in this book. It is enough that you imagine me now, as I am, with the companionship of my recollections, in comparative peace, desiring the solace of no one. It is enough that you imagine me now, elderly scribe to my younger self, and accept that I am changed, and that it was different before.
TWO
I don’t know how soon it was after the commencement of my visits to the Anders house that I began having a series of dreams that moved and upset me. It was a year, I think, perhaps more. I recall that I had just returned from a brief trip abroad. And I remember how I spent the evening before the first dream. With some others of her circle, I had accompanied Frau Anders to a concert; afterwards I joined a university friend at a café, where I drank somewhat more than was usual for me and argued for the unseemliness of suicide. Toward morning I returned to my rooms in a mood of buoyancy, and without undressing flung myself in bed.
I dreamed that I was in a narrow room which had no windows, only a small door about thirty centimeters high. I wanted to leave and bent down. When I saw that I could not squeeze through the door, I was ashamed that someone might see me conducting such an investigation into the obvious. There were several chains hanging from the wall, each of which terminated in a large metal band. I tried to fas
ten one of the chains first to some part of my body, but the band was too big for either my hand or my foot and too small for my head. I was in some prison, although apart from the chains the room did not have the appearance of a cell.
Then I heard a noise which came from the ceiling. A trap door opened, and a large man wearing a one-piece bathing costume of black wool peered down at me. The man lowered himself by his hands, hung for a moment, then jumped to the floor. When he stood up and walked, he limped a trifle and grimaced. I assumed he had hurt himself in the jump. I thought it possible that he was already lame; but then it seemed odd for him to have attempted such a feat, for the ceiling was high. And, being lame did not suit the acrobatic fitness of his shiny muscular limbs.
Suddenly I became afraid of him, for I knew I had no right to be in this room. He said nothing, and merely indicated by signs that I was to pass through the small door which I had previously investigated. The door was larger now. I knelt down, and crawled through. When I stood up, I was in another room which looked exactly like the first. The man in the bathing suit was behind me, holding a long copper-colored instrument which looked like a flute. He signalled me to dance by doing a few steps and turns himself. I was afraid again, and asked him why I had to do this. “Because in this room he dances,” he said in an even, placating voice.
“But I am not ‘he,’ ” I replied, delighted to be able to reason with him. “I am Hippolyte, a student at the university, but I do not dance.” These last words I said more emphatically than I meant to, with perhaps a touch of rudeness. I only meant to appear firm.
He answered with a threatening gesture aimed at my stomach, and the words, “That’s a mistake. He dances.”
“But why? Tell me why,” I protested. “It can’t give you pleasure to watch a clumsy man dance.”
He made another peremptory gesture, this time not simply a threat of violence but a hard blow across the calf of my leg with his flute which made me leap with pain. Then, in a tone of great mildness which seemed to contradict the blow, he said, “Does he want to leave this room?”
I knew that I was in the hands of someone stronger than myself, and that I could not afford to challenge the man’s peculiar way of addressing me. I wanted to please him. “Can’t he leave, if he doesn’t dance?” I asked, hoping he would not think I was mocking him.
With that he hurled the instrument at my face. My mouth filled with blood. I felt very cold. “He has lost his chance to dance,” he said. I fell to my knees in fear, closed my eyes; I smelled the damp odor of his woolen bathing suit, but nothing happened.
When I opened my eyes the other person in the room was a woman sitting in a tall wicker chair in the corner. She was dressed in something long and white, like a communion dress or a wedding gown.
I could not keep from staring at her, but I knew my gaze was discontinuous, broken, composed of hundreds of frozen gazes, with a tiny interval between each as long as the gaze itself. What interrupted my gaze—the black intervals between the frames, as it were—was the consciousness of something loose in my mouth, and of a painful swelling of my face, which I feared to know more about, as one fears to look at oneself because one doesn’t want to discover one is naked. Since, however, the cordial look which the woman turned on me did not reveal any antipathy, I tried to master my embarrassment. Perhaps my look went on and off because it was changing, and the only way I could convey the illusion of a smooth transition from one stage of my gaze to another was precisely by slicing into the gaze, whereas if it had remained continuous there would have been a blur, and a dissolving of my features, and she would have had a disagreeable impression of my face.
I thought of an ingratiating way to approach her. I started to dance, turning around and around. I jumped, and slapped my knees, and waved my arms. But when I stopped to catch my breath I saw that I had not moved nearer. My face felt heavy. She said, “I don’t like your face. Give it to me. I’ll use it as a shoe.”
I wasn’t alarmed by this, because she did not get up from her chair. I only said, “You can’t put a foot in a face.”
“Why not?” she answered. “A shoe has eyeholes.”
“And a tongue,” I added.
“And a sole,” she said, standing up.
“Why do you make silly jokes?” I cried, beginning to be alarmed. I asked her the purpose of the chains on the wall, this room being furnished as the other was. Then she told me a story about the house I was in and why I had been put in the room. I have forgotten this part of the dream. I remember only that there was a secret, and a penalty. Also that someone had fainted. And that because someone had fainted, and others were busy caring for him, I was being neglected, and had a right to demand better treatment.
I told her it was I who fainted.
“The chains are for you,” she said. She came toward me. I took off my shoes hastily, and went with her to the wall where she fitted the chains around my wrists. Then she brought me her chair to sit in.
“Why do you like me?” she asked. She was sitting opposite me in another chair. I explained to her that it was because she didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do. But as I said this, I wondered if it were so.
“Then there’s no need for me to like you,” she replied. “Your passion for me will maintain both of us here happily.”
I tried to think of a tactful way of telling her that I was happy but that I still wanted to leave. I was happier with her than I had been in the company of the man with the flute. The chains felt like bracelets. But my mouth was sore, my feet were perspiring, and my gaze, I knew, was insincere.
I stretched out my legs and placed my feet in the lap of her white dress. She complained that I was soiling the dress and told me that I would have to go. I could hardly believe my good fortune, and so strong was my feeling of relief that the desire to leave the room was now less urgent than the need to express my gratitude. I asked her if I could kiss her before I left. She laughed and slapped my face. “You must learn to take things before you ask,” she said sharply, “and dance before you are bidden, and surrender your shoes, and compose your face.”
Tears came to my eyes. In my distress I implored her to explain further. She didn’t answer. I threw myself on her, with the intention of taking her sexually, and at that very moment awoke.
I got out of bed in a state of elation. After making myself coffee I cleaned my room thoroughly and put everything in order. I knew that something had happened to me which I wanted to celebrate, and for this purpose the gestures of orderliness are always most satisfying. Then I sat at my desk and considered the dream. Several hours passed. At first the dream intrigued me because it was so clear; that is, I remembered it so well. Yet it seemed as if the very explicitness of the dream barred the way to any fruitful interpretation. I persisted. I devoted the entire morning to puzzling over the details of the dream, and urged myself to apply some ingenuity to their interpretation. But my mind refused to cavort about the dream. By mid-afternoon, I suspected that the dream had, so to speak, interpreted itself. Or even, that this morning of mental sluggishness was the real dream, of which the scenes in the two rooms were the interpretation. (I do not hope to make this thought wholly clear to the reader at the present moment.)
Certain features of my own character in the dream—my crafty humility, my propensity to shame, my posture of supplication and fear, my desire to placate and cajole and endear myself to the two personages of my dream—recalled to me the way many people speak of their childhood. But I was not a fear-ridden child: I don’t remember my mother, and my father never hit or frightened me. “This is not a dream of childhood,” I said, perhaps prematurely.
I paused over the man in the bathing suit and his flute, and his antagonism to me. I savored my attraction to the woman in the white dress, and her refusal of me. “I have had a sexual dream,” I said. And I could make little more of it than that, before the evening.
That evening I had an appointment at a café with the writer friend I have
already mentioned to you, the one who had been a professional boxer when he was in his early twenties. I had become more intimate with this man, who was about ten years older than myself, than with any of the others whom I met at Frau Anders’, despite the fact that he led a life with many compartments and a costume for each, a life difficult to grasp in its entirety. By day he sat in his room, dressed in boxing trunks, and wrote novels which were well received by the critics; for the aperitif hour and the early evening he put on a dark suit and went to the opera or to Frau Anders’ house; and in the late evening he roamed the boulevards of the city soliciting men, for which purpose he donned various exotic costumes of an aggressively male character, like that of a hoodlum, a sailor, or a truck driver. Since none of his novels had sold more than a few hundred copies, it was through prostitution and petty thievery that Jean-Jacques earned a modest living. Because he spoke quite openly of his “job” as he called it—he called writing his “work”—I had often asked him to tell me of his experiences. He confided more in me, I supposed, because he sensed something neutral in my attitude, something which was neither disapproval, nor attraction, nor anything like the respectful fascination with which his other friends regarded his “job.” His indiscretion and my attentiveness, up to the time of my first dream, had been the basis of our friendship.
That night, however, it was I who talked first, he who listened. I told Jean-Jacques of my dream, and it interested him. “Have you ever feared for your sanity?” he asked.
I wondered why he said that, since I understood that the license of dreaming permitted us the most irregular and cryptic fantasies. And I was surprised that this unusual man should find anything in my plain life to stir him to wonder.
“You see,” he continued, “I don’t dream. I find intolerable the slow leakage of my substance in dreams, so I have staged my life to incorporate the energy that is usually diverted in dreaming. My writing forces from me the dream-substance, prolongs it, plays with it. Then I replenish the substance in the show of the café, in the political intrigue of the salon, in the extravagances of the opera, in the comedy of roles which is the homosexual encounter.”
