Late in their careers, Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael made statements curiously similar to each other. Both said something to the effect that if she’d known at the time that the whole grand edifice of high culture could be demolished so easily she might not have been so aggressive in her attacks. No doubt the view was very different from 1964 or 1978 or whenever it was that people last spoke of high culture with a straight face. Now I can’t hear the name Pauline Kael without thinking of Renata Adler’s eviceration of her writing in the New York Review of Books, calling the collection under review “piece by piece, line by line, worthless” and arguing that “the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the laying down of a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line.” This is before Adler even gets to Kael’s “underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words” or “the degree of physical sadism” in her work or her use of “the mock rhetorical question” and “the hack carom” or the “four things she likes,” including “fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials.” It’s for a different reason, but a similar thing happens to me with Susan Sontag, whose name I can no longer hear without the thought of her cancer crossing my mind, or more accurately cancers, since there were three of them over thirty years, the last likely caused by the chemotherapy treatments for the first. “My mother,” writes her son David Rieff, “was determined to try to live no matter how terrible her suffering.” I’ve often dreamed of demolition myself. Everything on trial, everything at stake. Entire systems overturned as the dead burn off in the air. It’s probably my own weakness not to ignore the things I’m supposed to ignore, but what follows isn’t exactly regret, more like a kind of limit being suddenly reached. Not unlike those first days after being sick, when, like everyone else, you’re still so surprised to find the past intact.