susan sontag

30 december 1958, Paris

my relationship with harriet baffles me. i want it to be unpremeditated, unreflective - but the shadow of her expectations about what an "affair" consists in upsets my poise, makes me fumle. she with her romantic dissatisfactions, i with my romantic needs and longing...

one unexpected gift: that she is beautiful. i had remembered her as definitely not beautiful, rather gross and unattractive. she's anything but that. and physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly, important to me.