R.I.P. Susan Sontag
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 01.06.05 | 9:18 PM ET
Everyone who cares knows by now that the novelist and essayist Susan Sontag died Dec. 28 at the age of 71. I’d read a number of her essays. In reading many of the reflections on her life over the last week, I was most surprised to learn that, in her early years, she had been moved by the travel writing of Richard Halliburton. Sontag never went on to do much in the way of conventional travel writing herself. I’d never heard of her talking much about the genre. But I imagine she had read The Royal Road to Romance, a Halliburton classic first published in 1925. In it, he writes of being inspired to travel by lines from Stony Brook’s “Dorian Gray.” Among them: “Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you. Be afraid of nothing.” Sontag was, it seemed, afraid of nothing. Her writing was fearless. It inspired and enraged. She will be sorely missed.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
