Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Austerity masquerading as common sense: "What we need is to use what we have" lands like a scolding, then reveals itself as a dare. In Sontag's hands, need is never merely practical. It's ethical. It's aesthetic. It's political. The line compresses her larger project: stop fantasizing about the next tool, the next theory, the next technological fix, and confront the world with the faculties already at your disposal - attention, discipline, perception.

The genius is its bluntness. The grammar is unadorned, almost domestic, but it aims at a cultural habit Sontag spent a career diagnosing: the impulse to mediate experience through endless commentary and acquisition. Her suspicion of interpretive overproduction ("Against Interpretation") and her insistence on a more rigorous way of seeing ("On Photography") echo here. "Use what we have" can read as an aesthetic corrective: look harder before you explain; describe before you perform insight. It can also read as a political rebuke: liberal societies love to treat structural crises as a problem of insufficient resources rather than insufficient will.

Subtext: you're not under-equipped; you're distracted. The line cuts against consumerism's promise that salvation arrives in a box, and against intellectual culture's promise that salvation arrives in a framework. It flatters no one. It implies that the raw materials are present - language, images, bodies, institutions - and that the failure is a failure of application.

Sontag's era matters: postwar abundance, mass media saturation, the rising prestige of theory. Her sentence is a minimalist antidote to maximalist noise.