Susan Sontag makes me feel like an idiot

She does. I read her interview in Unsentamental Education and I feel like at my age she had already surpassed anything I will ever do in my life, including getting married and having kids. She started to learn at three and basically read all the great books by the time she was 14. Then she came to U of C when everyone had to take 14 year-long sequences, and passed out of half of them, even though she was 16. Then, she was disappointed that she would be done in only two years! How awful!

One day she walked into a friends hum class, I think, maybe soc, anyway, she was just sitting in, and then she went up to talk to the professor. Two weeks later they were married. Shortly after that they had their first child. It's as if she couldn't bear to do anything slowly.

So I'm a bit hesitant to use her observations about the U of C, since she is such an outlier, but some of them are really interesting. For example:

What led me to Chicago? It was reading an article in, I believe, Collier's magazine in 1946 or 1947. It was either by Robert Hutchins, explaining the aims and curriculum of the College, or it was an article about this eccentric place, which didn't have a football team, where all the people did was studey, and where they talked about Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas day and night. I thought, that's for me.

What's strange is that I was drawn to the U of C by an article - in the New York Times Magazine I think. Only this article was about an economist named Steven Levitt, who back then was known to very few people without PhD's in economics, but who is now the Freakonomist. Perhaps it is a testament to the reportorial skill of the New York Times Magazine, but the thought of sitting in this guy's class really made me want to go to the U of C. And I did. And in my first year I took Intro to Microeconomics with Steven Levitt. And loved it, from the first day when he auctioned off a six-pack of coke to demonstrate a demand curve.

Also what's interesting is that I was not the only person who saw that article, nor the only person who credits that article, at least in part, to their decision to come to U of C. Several of my friends had almost the same experience. I think it's because the U of C is a very professor-driven school - professors have all the power, and they attract droves of followers, almost cult-like. There are just so many personalities, like Friedman and Bloom and Arendt. Plus, you can't toss a tome written in a dead language without hitting a Nobel laureate. Or at least someone more brilliant than you'll ever be.

Like Susan Sontag.