Saturn is the planet of detours and delays according to Walter Benjamin, one of the six literary figures under examination in Susan Sontag's latest collections of essays. Sontag-understands the saturnine mentality- the slowness, the attentiveness, the patience, the melancholy need to work, the solitude, the complexity of excellence and stamina, Sontag's criticism is a kind of spiritual autobiography-it is sufficient to confirm not only her excellence but her stature as one of America's foremost critics' Washington Post