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January 12, 2010
Accumulation
French president Nicholas Sarkozy had this to say about Eric Rohmer's passing yesterday:
"Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclastic, light and serious, sentimental and moralistic, he created the ‘Rohmer’ style, which will outlive him.’’
Which coincided nicely with this passage from David Rieff's beautiful forward to At The Same Time, the final collection of essays by his mother, Susan Sontag, which I'm currently reading:
"Loved ones, admirers, detractors, works, work: beyond soon-to-be distorted or at least edited memories, beyond the possessions soon to be dispersed or distributed, beyond libraries, archives, voice recordings, videotape, and photographs - that is surely the most that can ever remain of a life, no matter how well and kindly lived, no matter how accomplished."
From which I'll skip to another passage in the same text:
"She was interested in everything. Indeed, if I had only one word with which to evoke her, it would be avidity. She wanted to experience everything, taste everything, go everywhere, do everything. Even travel, she once wrote, she conceived of as accumulation."
Accumulation. That's the end I have in mind as I plunge, sometimes greedily but just as often fearfully, ever forward, with as dense a bedrock of experience beneath me as I can manage to rest on when I get tired.
Posted by David Lowery at January 12, 2010 4:28 PM