Sontag's essay from 1966
Arendt writes in Life of the Mind "To think and be fully alive are the same"
I read a blog which says we get five good hours in a day to do meaningful work. I like this method of accounting for one's active, intentional hours during the day. This is good practise.
Read David Foster Wallace's Quack This Way (theory/coursework) and an essay on Hanoi by Sontag (fieldwork). Sontag writes pages long descriptions of how she came to understand and situate the whole of Hanoi during 1966. It comes down to letting the strangeness (a word that my mentor Atreyee uses) to do its work on oneself. The result of this openness, which is really always an ongoing process, is new feelings. Now that is something worth pausing and thinking about.
What might be meant by these 'new' feelings? I would love to have them. Perhaps we have them when we least expect them. Like a feeling that comes over us when the airplane wobbles. But I am more interested in those that can be cultivated by attention and that is what Sontag is moving towards in this essay.
Reading Gide's pages one recovers the truth that mostly recently surfaced in the Kafka essay by DFW, that both the tension and the release possibilities are within the reader (in this case, the writer).
My goal is to write freakily, like Bevins iii or Mr Vollman. Read with love and vigour.
The feeling that Sontag is talking about, one way to think of it is to call it love. A kind of love that Arendt speaks for, a form that is of and for the world. Now, this may seem too wide but we have our friends at Wilco who helps us think through this. Ending this with a line from their track "impossible Germany" which is really about listening.
This is what love is for To be out of place
Gorgeous and alone Face to face
Jeff tweedy knows something about being fully human. Alive.