Styles of Radical Will

by Susan Sontag

In our society, talk is perhaps the most intricately developed expression of private individuality. Conducted at this high pitch of development, talking becomes a double-edged activity: both an aggressive act and an attempted embrace. Thus talk often testifies to the poverty or inhibition of our feelings; it flourishes as a substitute for more organic connections between people. (When people really love, or are genuinely in touch with themselves, they tend to shut up.) But Vietnam is a culture in which people have not got the final devastating point about talking, have not gauged the subtle, ambivalent resources of language—because they don’t experience as we do the isolation of a “private self.” Talk is still a rather plain instrumentality for them, a less important means of being connected with their environment than direct feeling, love.