Well, R.I.P. Susan Sontag for one.
The tsunami -- well, it's all over the news. Am parochially worried about a neighbor who was probably in South India this past week, tho don't even know if she planned to be near the coast. Hard to wrap the brain around a hundred thousand dead.
Posted by Martha Bridegam at December 29, 2004 10:12 PMSontag's death had me turning to Joan Didion's On Self Respect:
...people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things...[they]exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.
Not exactly appropriate, but as close as I could get.
Hitchens' appreciation in Slate is pretty good, although he still couldn't let go of her "astonishing lapse" in the the New Yorker essay following September 11. I'd call it maybe bad timing on her part, but on the whole indicative of Didion's moral nerve.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at December 31, 2004 04:10 AM