Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Well, friends, if you know me, it's no secret that the writer and intellectual Susan Sontag has been a huge influence on my life.

And I just wanted to mention her at the outset here, not because she's the guest or even

the focus of this episode with Zena Hits, but because it's Susan Sontag who sort of gave me the permission to give myself permission

to take life an intellectual life, a life of reading and writing and thinking seriously.

When I was in undergrad in college, my friend Mary passed me a book of Susan Sontag's.

It was actually one of her novels, which don't get as much credit as they deserve.

And I read it and I thought this is such a strange novel. And it was just a few weeks from that that I just became someone who incessantly quoted her.

One quote that stuck with me was that a writer should be somebody who's interested in everything.

So I set out to be interested in everything, and what did that mean?

Well, it was also referenced by her when she said something,

and she said this in various ways, about how reading and thinking and engaging with art is a

noble pursuit in life, as noble as any other pursuit. And we shouldn't just treat it as kind of a flight of fancy,

but rather, you know, a call to who we are and who we can be in the world.

And that we don't have to see things in terms of what kind of job should I get.

Or, you know, how do I spend my time immersed in a world of activism?

But rather, what am I doing with the art, the idea, the concept, and the philosophy that enters my inner life.

What do I do with that?

How do I hold it, examine it, think through it, think with it?

So I became somebody who tried, at least to be interested in everything,

because after I want to be a writer, and I went to the

library at both colleges that I went to, I would go to the library, and I would just go through

...