Other Territories of Concern

In homage to the late Susan Sontag, I would like to provide a quotation from her essay "The Conscience of Words" included in her last book, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, published by Farrar Straus Giroux of New York in 2007, page 147. I completed the volume just after returning from my last visit to the Countess and Chicora Court. It is in harmony with so much of what has always moved me to be as I am that I must at least share with as many as I can possibly reach this one observation from it.

I don't believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as reader and then as writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to others selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern.