I write to define myself – -an act of self creation – -part of process of becoming – – in a dialogue with myself, with writers I admire living and dead, with ideal readers
Because it gives me pleasure (an ‘activity’)
I’m not sure what purpose my work serves
Personal salvation – -Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’
Susan Sontag 9 Dec, 1961
From Sunday New York Times Magazine p. 55 September 10, 2006
I am not sure of the difference between self-definition and personal salvation. Of course one wants to write oneself as the hero of one’s own story. Salvation and redemption coming at the end before death like Beowulf against the dragon, an old story, but then originality is an illusion, and a creation of a consumer society where the new is the desired. I wonder how much of the idea of the self is simply a remnant of the romantic movement, the enlightenment bifurcation of the individual from the whole. We are communal animals, perhaps the enlightenment was an aberration. What was the reaction from the church toward the enlightenment? What was underneath the religious objections to Voltaire and others? Was it just about power, or was there a fundamental reworking of ontology? Or is ontology based on power: epistemes determined by the dominant social group. See things my way or be suppressed.
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