Sempre second-tier (wait, that's mean)

From Bookforum, on Susan Sontag's journals:

What does it mean to be not a genius? It’s a question that most of us must answer. For Sontag, not being a genius meant being a cartographer, an orderer of the world. It meant being a student and a promiscuous reader. It meant trying harder, writing more, thinking more, pushing on. It meant criticism as an act of homage. We tend to think of geniuses as lonely, but I think, for Sontag, geniuses are bound by importance; they have the company of each other. They play together on the same “team.” Sontag, on the other hand, writes alone. “Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook!” she exhorts in 1980. “One doesn’t write to others anymore; one writes to oneself.” “The free intellectual: professors without students, priests without congregations, sages without communities,” she wrote in 1975. That sounds like hell to me, but Sontag calls it freedom.