4. Sigrid Nunez

“She was the opposite of Thomas Bernhard’s comic ‘possessive thinker,’ who feeds on the fantasy that every book or painting or piece of music he loves has been created solely for and belongs solely to him, and whose ‘art selfishness’ makes the thought of anyone else enjoying or appreciating the works of genius he reveres intolerable.” –Sigrid Nunez

What is it about works of art we love that makes us want to hoard their pleasures for ourselves? Or rather, what is it about works of art I love that makes me want to hoard their pleasures for myself? For I am certainly no stranger to this “art selfishness” that Thomas Bernhard describes and that Sigrid Nunez invokes and that, according to Nunez, was completely foreign to Susan Sontag (the “she” of the quotation above) who “wanted her passions to be shared by all.” This particular form of selfishness is, it seems to me, as natural as it is utterly childish. If a work of art communicates so strongly that it feels as if the artist is speaking directly to us, then how can we abide the idea that this allied soul might be addressing someone else with the same touching degree of understanding?

My own inclinations to art selfishness, though, which peaked during my utterly childish teen years, were considerably less noble than the example of the awestruck reader/viewer/listener overcome by the experience of instant revelation. When I was 15, my friend Shaun and I decided we would start listening to the experimental jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist John Zorn. We made this decision before we had actually heard his music, based on what we had read about it in several of the album guides we spent our time studying. The word on Zorn from The Penguin Guide to Jazz and The Spin Alternative Record Guide was that he was an avid and impatient appropriator, drawing freely from different pop cultural artifacts to create his music, switching rapidly from one musical idea to another, often after only a few seconds. This sounded appealing. What Shaun and I knew without the help of any guide book: no one else at our school, even our music savvy friends, had ever heard of Zorn. This was even more appealing. He could be all ours.

When we finally listened to Zorn, we liked him, but perhaps not as much as we had hoped. (I did later become quite a fan, stockpiling a number of his CDs and seeing him perform on several occasions.) But, at that time, our plan to make him “our guy” fizzled out and we moved on to the next thing. And then that thing, whatever it was, became what defined our taste in music—and thus our position in the world—for a while until it no longer served its purpose and we moved on to yet another thing. And then, eventually, the pattern became tiresome. At a certain point, you come to rest more easily in your identity. You learn to be content with what you like and realize that taste is not always the best tool for self-definition (and is in fact filled with all sorts of unsavory cultural biases). You may even want to follow the example of Susan Sontag, whose writings, when you discover them some years later, will become a source of obsession no less pronounced than those that occupied your teen years. You may do that unthinkable thing and try to “share your passions with all.”