Remembering Susan Sontag

I first saw Susan Sontag at a reading for her book AIDS and Its Metaphors. The reading was held at a popular South Berkeley bookstore, just down the street from Alice Waters's famous restaurant. This was in the 1980s, before it all became the gourmet ghetto, and the scene was pretty loose. The audience that night was evenly divided between AIDS activists and Sontag fans. I went at the urging of a fellow AIDS researcher. "I like to go to readings," she explained. "It's like bedtime stories for grown-ups."

We sat quite near the front, in a very crowded room. Sontag stood up and said something like, "I've been on this book tour for a while and I'm sick of reading from AIDS and Its Metaphors. Instead, I'm going to read a story about going to see Thomas Mann when I was fifteen." Oh shit, I thought. What kind of person has even heard of Thomas Mann at fifteen? Even better, what kind of person has heard of him and wants to go visit him? But there she was, according to the story, an ultrahip teenager in LA, and she heard he was in town. She and a friend went and had tea with the master, who, as I remember the story, struck her as a cranky old man. When I was fifteen, my biggest out-of-the-box adventure was to go with my science camp friends visiting each other's houses of worship. It just does not measure up. I sat through the reading disturbed. Who is this smart? I kept asking myself.

Several copies of AIDS and Its Metaphors live on my bookshelves, and Sontag's penetrating analysis has always proved useful. "Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide," she wrote, in what remains, for me, the most useful summary of globalization I have seen.¹ Globalization was not a word, or it was not a word I had heard, when she wrote the book. But then, she had known to go see Thomas Mann . . .

The invitation to be in a seminar with Sontag arrived in the middle of an awful year, and it shifted everything for me. The seminar was devoted to readings about pain and what it meant. Pain—as in sharp shooting dull ache hot flash, a list a classmate had taught me in the third year of medical school—which is posed to the patient as, "What is the quality of your pain—sharp shooting dull ache hot flash?" This is a typical medical conversation that has failed before it has begun because that is not how people think. Sontag knew that. She proposed instead that our seminar parse pain the way people do: by the second, by the interminable sentence, by the despair. How does one do that in a fifteen-minute visit? There is that inevitable collapse of humanism in the face of the constraints of the billable hour. She did not care. Tea with Mann, pain with Sontag; there was a leisurely moment of consideration that she created for us in the seminar: to widen our horizons, to teach us about the larger world because we doctors cannot really understand it from the depth of our immersion in our own milieu.

I wanted very much to say something she would think was smart. Juvenile, but perhaps inevitable. In my office and faced with my daily troubles, I imagined Sontag saying, "Why, you are clever." Instead, I read a sentence from a story Sontag wrote, as she had proposed I should, and I understood the pain. The accurate description of the pain led to an accurate diagnosis. When I said, as any psychiatrist might, that the loss of her friend to AIDS had been a shock and she had written without stopping for breath as a way of mastering her shock, she simply said, "I...