{"id":1317,"date":"2023-07-30T12:53:45","date_gmt":"2023-07-30T12:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/07\/30\/susan-sontag-on-elias-canetti\/"},"modified":"2023-07-30T12:53:45","modified_gmt":"2023-07-30T12:53:45","slug":"susan-sontag-on-elias-canetti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/07\/30\/susan-sontag-on-elias-canetti\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">From <a href=\"https:\/\/granta.com\/canetti\/\">Granta<\/a>, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me.&#0160; It reads well with &#39;weblog&#39; substituted for &#39;notebook.&#39;<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 13pt;\">The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is \u2018everything\u2019. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti\u2019s entries take up the aphorist\u2019s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one\u2019s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,\u2019 Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. \u2018One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent \u2013 that is, more oneself,\u2019 Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">Related: <a href=\"https:\/\/williamfvallicella.substack.com\/p\/susan-sontag-on-the-art-of-the-aphorism\">Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Granta, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me.&#0160; It reads well with &#39;weblog&#39; substituted for &#39;notebook.&#39; The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is \u2018everything\u2019. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/07\/30\/susan-sontag-on-elias-canetti\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[463,40,416],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canetti-elias","category-literary-matters","category-sontag-susan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}