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good. After the lecture, she entertained questions. Time for just one more. You there, she
said, pointing to me. Oh my God, let's try to get it out without too much quaking.
“Jung believed that the role of the symbol was to bridge apparently irreconcilable oppos-
ites. What role do you believe that our esoteric traditions that engage the imagination might
play in helping us move beyond these kinds of intellectual oppositions?”
She paused for a moment.
“None.”
Her comment was met with hearty laughter and broad applause, she thanked everyone
for coming, and people filed out of the auditorium. I sat there stunned as I slowly and
grudgingly admitted to myself that yet another of my heroes from the sixties had just bitten
the dust. My goddess had feet of clay. She was so damn bright, she was politically cour-
ageous, and she was spiritually blind.
“What you see is what you get. The rest is fraud. Grow up already.”
***
Susan Sontag has also entered my thoughts indirectly through a book that I asked Pam to
bring to the hospital. It's a dense, polemical essay by Philip Rieff, the man to whom Susan
Sontag was married during the fifties. I initially read a review of his strangely titled book,
My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority
in
The New Re-
public
, a journal of art and politics to which I have subscribed ever since the unremitting
hostility of
The New York Review of topics
towards Israel finally turned my stomach.
I started Rieff's book about a year earlier, nibbling at it in small bites. Now I finally have
time to read it for an hour or two a day when I take a break from writing. Apart, perhaps,
from James Joyce's
Finnegan's Wake
(which I quickly gave up on), I can't think of any
book I've tried to tackle that's been more difficult to read. I wonder how many readers
make it all the way through the topic, following the detailed treasure map that he has so
carefully crafted.
Histheme isthebattlefield ofmodernculture, wheretheWesternintellectual, scientific and
artistic elites have worked ingeniously to undermine, discredit and discard the religious tra-
ditions which held sway before their own ascendancy. His exposure of the ultimate nihil-
ism of this enterprise is brilliant and disturbing. If you had any doubts as to whether or not
we are on a road to nowhere, the author lays them to rest. What was it that Frodo's guide
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