Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts

“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”

The recently released volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library), is a treasure trove of insight — on writing, on censorship, on aphorisms — from the deepest corners of one of the greatest minds in modern history. But besides her extraordinary intellect, what made Sontag a force of nature was also her complex and ever-evolving emotional perception, brimming with extreme self-awareness and keen reflection on her relationships with others.

I sieved Sontag’s journals for her most poignant, most private meditations on love — candid, vulnerable, hopeful, hopeless — and asked artist extraordinaire Wendy MacNaughton (♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥) to hand-letter and illustrate them exclusively for Brain Pickings. Enjoy.

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 is superb and revealing in its entirety — impossible to recommend enough.

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