In the interest of noticing things like that, we record the passing, due to cancer, in New York, of writer Susan Sontag.

Don't get us wrong: Gnomon feels a great deal of compassion for anyone dying of cancer.

And she was pretty big among the intellectual classes, we admit.

But despite the view of some that Ms. Sontag was "one of the most powerful intellects of her generation," we will register here our opinion that in 50 years she will be a footnote to a footnote -- the footnote she is appended to being the transitory historical aberration currently seen in fashionable circles as "liberalism" and "progress."