Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag is swatting away a tired critical reflex: the assumption that serious art must perform estrangement, that intellect equals distance, that modernity’s default posture is ironic withdrawal. “I don’t want to express alienation” reads like a refusal of the fashionable mood of mid-century high culture, where detachment could pass as sophistication and alienation as proof of depth. She’s not denying that alienation exists; she’s rejecting it as an aesthetic badge.

The phrasing matters. “Express” is doing quiet work: alienation, for Sontag, isn’t a truth to confess but a stance to stage. She’s suspicious of art that treats numbness as the highest form of honesty. By contrast, “various kinds of passionate engagement” widens the frame beyond mere enthusiasm. Engagement can be erotic, political, sensory, formal; it can be with an idea, an image, a body, an argument. That pluralism is pure Sontag: the critic as someone who wants more life, not just better interpretations.

Then she turns from autobiography to imperative. “All my work says” is a self-curation move, compressing essays, novels, manifestos into a single through-line. The final triad - “be serious, be passionate, wake up” - sounds almost like an anti-cynicism chant, but it’s tougher than inspiration-poster uplift. “Wake up” implies we’re sleepwalking through experience, cushioned by irony and commentary. Sontag’s subtext is that attention is a moral act. To look harder, feel more sharply, and think without anesthesia is not just an artistic preference; it’s a way of resisting cultural drift toward disengaged spectatorship.