2012 in a cited quotation
"I know the future is open and unpredictable. My style, though, is to want to close it - to make it predictable - at least the immediate future (3 months, 6 months, a year) or the longer future with respect to my most intimate relations. A completely open, unpredictable future makes me horribly anxious. I can’t imagine how I will function (because I assume functioning in an effective, creative - not blundering - way entails making plans). Of course, I’m fairly confident that I could function somehow - but on a lower level - even if I have no certainties before me. But it has never really occurred to me, I now realize, that this is anything but an undesirable (and, in the case of love, extremely painful and destructive) limitation. It’s as if I’m supposed to walk through a forest without being allowed to inform myself whether or not it’s full of wolves. Sure, I’ll cross the forest anyway- but it seems just stupid, a pointless risk, that I wasn’t allowed to inform myself first, when I know the information is available.
"[There are two vertical lines next to this sentence in the margin.] Only now do I see the limits of my view of life - how carefully I limit surprise, risk-taking, unanticipated sources of change.
"The fact is that I have been unusually loose and open to risk-taking in matters of work- tolerant and relatively anxiety-free in work situations that seem to arouse intolerable amounts of anxiety and insecurity in most other people. But I have been so damned cautious, self-protective, uninventive, anxiety-prone, and needful of reassurance in matters of love. I am so very much more cool, loose, adventurous in work than in love. So much more inventive. So easily convinced that if ‘this’ doesn’t work out, something else will - that there’s always ‘more.’ Just what I don’t feel about people - whether friends or lovers.
[In the margin:] ‘scarcity economy of love.’"
--Susan Sontag in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
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It hasn't been a good end-of-year feeling for me overall because the holidays hamper progress. It's nice to get away from the system once in a while but some of us are left hanging on in uncertainty until things normalise for all of us.
Still it was a great year so may your year two thousand thirteen be beautiful and kind, lj friends.
"[There are two vertical lines next to this sentence in the margin.] Only now do I see the limits of my view of life - how carefully I limit surprise, risk-taking, unanticipated sources of change.
"The fact is that I have been unusually loose and open to risk-taking in matters of work- tolerant and relatively anxiety-free in work situations that seem to arouse intolerable amounts of anxiety and insecurity in most other people. But I have been so damned cautious, self-protective, uninventive, anxiety-prone, and needful of reassurance in matters of love. I am so very much more cool, loose, adventurous in work than in love. So much more inventive. So easily convinced that if ‘this’ doesn’t work out, something else will - that there’s always ‘more.’ Just what I don’t feel about people - whether friends or lovers.
[In the margin:] ‘scarcity economy of love.’"
--Susan Sontag in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
-------------------------
It hasn't been a good end-of-year feeling for me overall because the holidays hamper progress. It's nice to get away from the system once in a while but some of us are left hanging on in uncertainty until things normalise for all of us.
Still it was a great year so may your year two thousand thirteen be beautiful and kind, lj friends.