It is not simple to be able to love calmly, to trust without ambivalence, to hope without self-mockery, to act courageously, to perform arduous tasks with unlimited resources of energy. In this society, a few people are able just faintly to imagine all these as achievable goals—though only in their private life. But in Vietnam the very distinction taken for granted here between the public and the private has not been strongly developed. This indistinct separation between public and private among the Vietnamese also informs their pragmatic, verbally and conceptually meager style of making their revolution. By way of contrast, the acute sense of the discontinuity of private and public in the West may partly explain the amount of talk, often very interesting talk, that accompanies every revolutionary gesture. In our society, talk is perhaps the most intricately developed expression of private individuality. Conducted at this high pitch of development, talking becomes a double-edged activity: both an aggressive act and an attempted embrace. Thus talk often testifies to the poverty or inhibition of our feelings; it flourishes as a substitute for more organic connections between people. (When people really love, or are genuinely in touch with themselves, they tend to shut up.) But Vietnam is a culture in which people have not got the final devastating point about talking, have not gauged the subtle, ambivalent resources of language—because they don’t experience as we do the isolation of a "private self." Talk is still a rather plain instrumentality for them, a less important means of being connected with their environment than direct feeling, love.'
Susan Sontag
