When I heard the news that Susan Sontag had died -- and at only 71 -- I felt both the cultural loss and some personal sadness. She had joined me here in Studio 360 a couple of years ago. As the US was preparing  to invade Iraq, we were producing a show about war, and we decided that Susan Sontag would be a perfect guest.

Actually she would've been a great for Studio 360 almost any week. She was, after all, the great American public intellectual, a stupendously intelligent essayist and novelist (and filmmaker and theater director) who knew so much about so many things, and had so many interesting and valuable things to say about the culture.

It was thirty years ago in college that I first read Susan Sontag, her essay from ten years earlier called "Notes on Camp." It was as smart and electrifying as any contemporary essay I had ever read, and showed me a fresh, rigorous, free-wheeling, intellectually agnostic way of thinking about aesthetics and sensibility without regard for preconceived pigeonholes like "high art" and "pop culture." It was, for a kid fresh from Omaha, a bracing gush of pure thought. I immediately understood her great and grand reputation. I still think it's one of the most important essays written in the last half century.

And so, when she agreed to come here in 2003 to talk about war, I was extremely nervous. I was so eager to prove to her that Studio 360 was worthy of her.

We had a great conversation - a real conversation. We disagreed, we agreed, we probed, we laughed. She was demanding as a conversations but generous, wide awake, engaged.  You could hear her mind working in real time.

Like when I asked her how her 2 years in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war had made her completely rethink her earlier, famous theory from "On Photography" about how modern people had become jaded to images of war and brutality.

Susan Sontag: Well, I don't think it's true. And I guess - I like to argue with myself and well, not because I just like to argue with myself, because I like to think that I have a better view, that my experience teaches me something. If we don't learn from our experience, then what else can we learn from? And I think my view, which I think has been influential, is too simple. I don't think we just become inured or desensitized. I think it's a much more complicated process and I think that people do feel turned off or indifferent to images of horror and war and suffering that they see and that they feel indignant about. I think it comes not because they're blasé but because they feel impotent or powerless. And I think that's a perfectly understandable reaction.

KA: So in a sense, your change of heart about the power of images to portray war and atrocity represents kind of a dis-disillusioning or a re-illusioning or...

Susan Sontag: [laughs] Well, that's a very clever way of putting it. A dis-disillusioning, yes. Dis-disillusionment, that's right. That's absolutely right.

"Arguing with herself," she said -- and here, a quarter century later, admitting she lost the argument and had been wrong before.

Amazing.

Another thing I admired about her was her ferocity against sentimentality - against simple, black and white thinking of almost any kind. Like when in our conversation we were talking about the similarities between the good guys and bad guys in war.

Susan Sontag: Who said that wicked people don't have family lives, or have good taste in music? Monsters don't come with signs over their heads saying, 'I'm a monster' and then they don't participate in any other human activities. I think we have to understand that it's human beings that do this and we have to stop being surprised. It's really the beginning of being an adult, I think, not to be surprised. Every other reaction, we shouldn't be surprised.

Susan Sontag was not always solemn  - "Notes on Camp" is the Rosetta stone of a certain kind of comic, ironic sensibility. But she was a deeply serious person.  Near the end of our conversation, I asked her why, in the face of the monstrous, ugly facts of life, like war and human suffering, we ought to care about mere plays or stories or paintings.

Susan Sontag: What finally matters to me about the arts, whether it's literature or film or other dramatic arts or music or dance, is the way it deepens us, the way it extends our feelings, and tenderness and compassion and the ability just to recognize everyone's humanity, because in the end, the most important thing is that we are all human beings, including the people that commit these wicked acts.

We will miss Susan Sontag.