No coffee today--just some good ol' sweet tea

Feeling guilty about not doing the readings initially, I decided to challenge myself to try to tackle Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor and Aids and its Metaphor." Overall, I was really impressed by her points about illness and how society and the individual perceive it. On the one hand, I agree that society likes to become obsessed with particular things that either arouse extreme fear or excitement in its people. Because people's attitudes and opinions are always evolving, it is easy to see society's focus shift. In the case of scarily stigmatizing illnesses, it shifts from cancer to AIDs. However, unlike the way Sontag depicts this fear, I believe society's ''obsession'' is justifiable due to the mystery and uncertainty that are involved with each illness. While medicine and technology do advance everyday, there is never a guarantee that one may become ill with a statistically curable form of the illness or that there are enough drugs that have been made to control it to a manageable degree. Realistically, it is a multidimensional war where a sick person fights the disease on an individual level with their physical self, and the population fights it on a societal level with medical advancements and biased propaganda. It involves blood, sweat, tears and self interest. I therefore did not appreciate her dumps on capitalism and war.

Whether I agree with all her points on a thematic basis, there are a lot of positive compliments to give to her writing style. Firstly, she incorporates numerous passages from other authors to elaborate her points and provide evidence for her claims. From Kafka to John Donne, I was very pleasantly surprised and excited to see the array of writers she used (even a few of my favorites!) I also appreciate how she admits   she was wrong, to an extent, in her use and understanding of the term "metaphor." In general, its hard to reflect and admit mistake but to admit so in her writing to such a large audience is extremely respectable, in my opinion. Finally, her use of metaphors to explain illness was, of course, intriguing and impressive. I especially enjoyed reading about the advertisements for TB and how the understanding of illness shifted from almost magical to a physical invader like a flee. Sontag did an awesome job in writing these two distinct passages, and I as well applaud her for responding to her illness in this literary fashion.