“Marriage is based on the principle of inertia.”
“My God,
it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee,
working, working, & nothing after all,” wrote Charles Darwin as heweighed the pros and cons of
marriage before committing himself to the love of his life, with whom he had ten
children.
Earlier this month, artist Wendy MacNaughton
illustrated Susan Sontag’s meditations on
love, culled from the author’s journals between
1964 and 1980 — a stirring blend of cynical disillusionment and romantic
idealism. To get there, Sontag had passed through a turbulent youth of crashing
against the walls of her sexual identity and eventually marrying Philip Rieff
at the tender age of seventeen after a ten-day courtship. In the first
installment of her published diaries, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (public library), edited by Susan and Philip’s
son David Rieff, a 23-year-old Sontag shares this grim antidote to Darwin’s
optimistic take on spousal union as she grapples with the dissolution of her
own marriage to Philip — a kind of painful separateness bespeaking the opposite
of the limbic revision that happens between two souls connected in a healthy, loving
relationship.
On August 12, 1956, she writes:
In marriage, every desire becomes a decision
She revisits the subject on September 4:
Whoever invented
marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the
dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it
aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
Quarrels eventually become pointless, unless
one is always prepared to act on them — that is, to end the marriage. So, after
the first year, one stops ‘making up’ after quarrels — one just relapses into
angry silence, which passes into ordinary silence, and then one resumes again.
Then, in an entry dated November 18, 1956,
Sontag puts down the outline for an intended essay on marriage:
A
Project — Notes on Marriage
Marriage is based on the principle of
inertia.
Unloving proximity.
Marriage is all private — no public —
behavior.
The glass wall that separates one couple from
another.
Friendship in marriage. The smooth skin of
the other.
[Protestant
theologian Paul] Tillich: the marriage vow is idolatric (places one moment
above all others, gives that moment [the] right to determine all the future
ones). Monogamy, too. He spoke disparagingly of the “extreme monogamy” of the
Jews.
Rilke thought the
only way to keep love in marriage was by perpetual acts of separation-return.
The leakage of talk in marriage.
(My marriage, anyway.)
(My marriage, anyway.)
Sontag and Philip separated shortly
thereafter and permanently divorced in 1958. She never completed the “Notes on
Marriage” essay, though many of the ideas teased out in Reborn were eventually fully explored in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays.
Also from Sontag’s diaries, her thoughts on censorship and aphorisms, and hersynthesized advice on writing.
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