What was the worst cruelty: personal or political? Svetlana thought political: denying a person’s personhood and turning them into a number. I thought it was just as bad to be tormented to death by a relative or a landlord as to be shot in a death camp. Was every smart person funny? I thought humorlessness was the essence of stupidity. Svetlana thought she knew some genuinely smart people who happened not to be interested in whether things were funny. We agreed that Susan Sontag was not funny.
