"Love, Sex, and the World Between," Susan Sontag And James Thurber

"Is sex necessary?" young E.B. White and James Thurber asked in their endlessly delightful 1929 collaboration. More than eight decades later, philosopher Alain de Botton asserted that to think more and better about sex is to reclaim our humanity. And yet for all of our musings on sex, it remains oddly disconnected from our best understanding of love.

In Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview (public library) – the superb 1978 conversation with Jonathan Cott that ranked among the best biographies, memoirs, and history books of 2013 and also gave us the beloved author on the false divide between "high" and pop culture and how our cultural polarities imprison us – Sontag, one of the most celebrated minds of the last century, who spent decades contemplating love and being discombobulated over sex, zooms in with her characteristic precision on our culture's impossible expectations of the relationship between the two:

We ask everything of love. We ask it to be anarchic. We ask it to be the glue that holds the family together, that allows society to be orderly and allows all kinds of material processes to be transmitted from one generation to another. But I think that the connection between love and sex is very mysterious. Part of the modern ideology of love is to assume that love and sex always go together. They can, I suppose, but I think rather to the detriment of either one or the other. And probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don’t. And why do people want to be in love? That’s really interesting. Partly, they want to be in love the way you want to go on a roller coaster again – even knowing you’re going to have your heart broken. What fascinates me about love is what it has to do with all the cultural expectations and the values that have been put into it. I’ve always been amazed by the people who say, “I fell in love, I was madly, passionately in love, and I had this affair.” And then a lot of stuff is described and you ask, “How long did it last?” And the person will say, “A week, I just couldn’t stand him or her."

Susan Sontag's private thoughts on love, culled from her published diaries, illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton. Details here.

Sontag, whose timeless and often radical wisdom has addressed everything from why photography is a form of violent consumerism tohow to improve education to the creative benefits of boredom to why lists appeal to us, explores platonic love as another concept loaded with cultural ambivalence:

I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn’t have slept with for anything, but I think that’s something else. That’s friendship – love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn’t mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn’t necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can’t imagine being fond of somebody I don’t want to touch or hug, so therefore there’s always an erotic aspect to some extent.

Ultimately, however, she returns to the toxic age-related stereotypes and polarities to which we subscribe as a culture, to which she points as the root of our unease about love:

Our ideas of love are terribly bound up in our ambivalence about these two conditions – the positive and negative valuations of childhood, the positive and negative valuations of adulthood. And I think that, for many people, love signifies a return to values that are represented by childhood and that seem censored by the dried-up, mechanized, adult kinds of coercions of work and rules and responsibilities and impersonality. I mean, love is sensuality and play and irresponsibility and hedonism and being silly, and it gets to be thought of in terms of dependence and becoming weaker and getting into some kind of emotional slavery and treating the loved one as some kind of parent figure or sibling. You reproduce a part of what you were as a child when you weren’t free and were completely dependent on your parents, particularly your mother.

Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview remains a most highly recommended read in its entirety. Complement it with Alain de Botton on how to think more about sex and Sontag's illustrated meditations on love.