文字的良心SusanSontag.docVIP

文字的良心the conscience of words by Susan Sontag os angels times Sunday June 10, 2001 (l.a.times editor‘s note: since 1963, the Jerusalem prize has been awarded at the biennial Jerusalem international book fair to a writer whose work explores the freedom of the individual in society. Past recipients include jorge luis borges, simone de beauvoir, zbigniew herbert, graham greene, milan kundera, j.m. coetzee, and don delillo. this year the award was given to susan sontag, who delivered the following remarks on may 9 in Jerusalem. )we fret about words, we writers. words mean. words point. they are arrows. arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. and the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. they can expand, or cave in. they can come to be filled with a bad smell. they will often remind us of other rooms, where we‘d rather dwell or where we think we are already living. there can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. and eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down. what do we mean, for example, by the word peace? do we mean an absence of strife? do we mean a forgetting? do we mean a forgiveness? or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor? it seems to me that what most people mean by peace is victory. the victory of their side. that‘s what peace means to them, while to the others peace means defeat. if the idea takes hold that peace, while in principle to be desired, entails an unacceptable renunciation of legitimate claims, then the most plausible course will be the practice of war by less than total means. calls for peace will be felt to be, if not fraudulent, then certainly premature. peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit. peace has to be re-settled. re-colonized .... and what do we mean by honor? honor as an exacting standard of private conduct seems to belo