Word: things
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Apart from a dogmatic, astringent manner, Miss Sontag does not specifically resemble Miss McCarthy. She is, for one thing, far more "serious." By comparison, the younger McCarthy seems a kind of Vassar gun moll, playing Bonnie to the Clyde of Dwight Macdonald and other Partisan Reviewers of the 1930s and 1940s. Styles have changed. The vices (and virtues) of cleverness have now been replaced by the virtues (and vices) of relentlessly with-it seriousness. Susan Sontag-complete with academic sojourns at Oxford and the Sorbonne, and stints as a philosophy teacher-has proved to be just the girl to play...
...concept of being "distracting" is interesting. It implies that we experience things distinctly from each other. This isn't the case at all. The experiencing of a certain time in your existence is not an additive construction piling together your imagined chemical sector, your sense perception sector, and your intellectual understanding sector. Isolating, for example, your sense perceptions as an independent phenomenon was something we did only to make out study of them easier. They are part of the whole thing that is you. And they only mean anything when it is seen how they fit in with the whole...
...ordered (because your mind is so incredibly ordered). If you have been chewing the top of a Bic pen in your zeal, you would probably leave it behind somewhere, not remembering you need it to cover the pen's point, because you wouldn't believe that such a crumpled thing could belong to the set of objects that had to do with...
...Another thing is that you are generally unable to feel emotion. You can't love anyone or want anything; you can only order its existence. You can't care about anything in a way that you feel; you can only be interested in it in an intellectual way. This absence of emotion can be frightening, but only so if you believe yourself to be on a a "trip." You are equally incapable of emotion while playing tennis or doing anyone of a great set of totally occupying things. Do you ever stop playing tennis for fear of departing from...
...only take a flyer at what would happen if dexedrine ever came into much wider use than it already is now here. (For one thing there would be more illness because using it a couple of times in a row really wrecks you for days.) But there would probably be a good deal more frittering away of time. Students wouldn't "sweat" their work as they piled up real-life smelling, touching experiences in their new free time...