… this quote is highlighted 273 times in my Kindle edition book…

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.1

… Sontag concludes the chapter discussing the racist nature of photographs of the dead and dying in African and Asian countries… a collective fascination with the less fortunate as a means to confirm the good fortune of not living in one of “those” countries… human beings are very good at othering… one questions the adaptive advantage, isn’t there something wrong with nature’s programming here?… is getting one’s genes into the next generation so important?… at this point i confront the reality that, as far as i know, i have not projected my genes into the next generation, a fact that at times leaves me feeling a failure…


  1. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others (p. 70). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. ↩︎