A book that is currently making the rounds of the mainline book reviews is a new biography of the social critic Susan Sontag.  Although Sontag died of cancer some years ago, she remains a presence in many discussions about culture and society.  In her essays and novels, she offered some profound insights into the nature of how we think about things like art, photography, and disease.
     A number of years after her death, her son, David Rieff, published a book about her final months and days.  Titled Swimming in a Sea of Death, it was a moving portrait of a person who loved life dearly and was therefore deeply anguished that she had to let go of it so soon.  She died at the age of seventy-one.

     At one point in this new biography, the author quotes an exchange between Sontag and a nurse after the latter informed her that her remaining time was waning rapidly.  "You might want to take this time," the nurse suggested, "to concentrate on your spiritual values."
     "I have no spiritual values," Sontag replied.
     It's a striking statement.  Whether we believe in God and, sometimes by extension, an afterlife, or not, we all tangle constantly with the notion that we think and dream in terms other than raw materiality.
     Particularly if we deny that we do so.