On not having enough time to write

ife by assuming a summation rather than allowing life to spill pointlessly over the edge into oblivion.

When, after learning of Sontag’s frustration at not having time
enough to write fiction, she lament of others that ‘finally,
he was a lifelong practising intellectual, which seemed to
trump
 his achievement as a novelist, and he was a passionate
political activist, which did not enhance his credentials as a
novelist either,’

Here we see the echo of her own literary disappointment
which is inescapable. The sense of mourning for an
incomplete vocation is emphatic. She speaks of a
‘saving larger view’ that is ‘the novelist’s or the poet’s –
which does not obviate the truth of political understanding,
but tells us there is more than politics, more, even, than
history. Bravery . . . and indifference . . . and sensuality . . .
and the living creatural world . . . and more than...well anything.