Here are three things, tenuously connected, I’d like to mention today:*Contrary to previously expressed hopes that the Indian Ocean disaster might encourage a new generation of sceptics, this Washington Post headline doesn’t bode well: ‘In Angry Waves, the Devout See an Angry God.‘ *As the Economist pointed out, this is not the worst loss of humanity inflicted by our (or their) bipolar Deity in recent times. The earthquake that struck the Chinese city of Tangshan in 1976 is estimated to have claimed at least 600,000 lives. *The end of a single life, and especially one that seemed to have been complete, might seem nearly meaningless in the context of kilodeaths but it’s significant that even during tsunami coverage, pages were cleared to mark the passing of Susan Sontag*. I think Sontag was important for what she represented as much as for what she wrote. Unashamedly serious, occasionally sanctimonious, she nevertheless made the life of the mind seem like an alluring luxury. This suggestion, I hope, is not as shallow as it seems: Sontag herself argued, most famously in the essay “Against Interpretation”, that the sensual appreciation or visceral reaction to art always triumphed over dry interpretation. So despite the much-repeated story of her apartment containing 15,000 books and no television, there didn’t seem to be anything primly ascetic about Sontag. In fact, it seemed, she was doing exactly what she wanted. And in passing she even made Christopher Hitchens stop shilling for the neocons momentarily and write an appreciation that borders on sanity. *In contrast, you have to feel a bit sorry for the shade of Aldous Huxley, whose passing was slightly overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy.