Susan Sontag, 71

The death of Susan Sontag hit us sharply, from behind. Some great minds you expect, finally, to pass on. Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet and Nobel Prize-winner, a tragic figure from a tragic country, died a few months ago, as expected.

But Susan! She was our Ms. America, raised out in the Wild West. She taught us "Camp" when we were all kids. When she published On Photography in the 70s, she gave me and others cause to write endlessly, seriously, about the medium we loved.

Wild, flirty, charming, she took everyone over, including me, the one time we talked, almost all day, in 1977. She was never going to die. She meant more to virtually every intellectual left in this land (after November's election) than any other mind. For many of us, even in the wake of the quakes and tsunamis in Southern Asia, her going knifed more deeply than the tens of thousands that perished in the same week she left us, pilloried by leukemia.

It's next to impossible to explain why this clever, crisp woman had such a profound impact on our culture. But she did. Not merely with the force of her wit, but her eloquence, her ability to stab us in the heart precisely when we needed stabbing-about the need to democratize high culture, to honor "style" as content itself, the essence of "camp"; about the villainy we were perpetrating in Vietnam (and again, now, in Iraq); about the deep-seated power of embattled Poland and Solidarity; about "fascinating fascism"; and, later, about the brutality of state communist power-"fascism," she quipped, "with a human face."

Susan Sontag didn't know where culture ended and politics began. She never wrote a line that didn't in some sense entwine them. When she told a friend that all of her work intended to get us "involved, passionate, active," she sounded like a child of the Silent Generation determined to shout back.

She put everyone on edge. Why? Not only that razor-sharp mind. Susan Sontag radiated passion. Passion with a firm moral edge. I imagine Jesus or Mohammed, if they were real, had that edge. Around them, Susan, or her books, you would always feel challenged to reach up to her level of scathing seriousness.

Let's end with Poland, her embattled lover. Milosz's "A Poem for the End of the Century" crowns the power of the word, of all that Susan wrote, of her razor-sharp eloquence. It's almost unbearable, too cutting, because so true:To whom should I turn/With that affair so dark/Of pain and also guiltIn the structure of the world...? ...Impossibly intricate/Better to stop speech here/This language is not for people.