The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.
John BergerTags: poverty
Sorrel soup:
"You cut the egg into slices, and you eat it with the green soup. And the mixture of the sharp green acidity and the round comfort of the egg reminds you of something extraordinary and far away.
Of home?
Certainly not, not even for Poles.
Of what then?
...Of survival, perhaps.
I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
John BergerA woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
Tags: identity seeing being-seen
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
John BergerTags: knowledge seeing explanations connections
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John BergerTags: past future present history connections mystification
هناك فرق شاسع بين الأمل و التوقع . في البدء اعتقدتُ أن الفرق
يكمن في المدة الزمنية , و أن الأمل ينتظر أمراً مازال بعيد المنال
كنت مخطئة . التوقع ينتمي إلى الجسد و الأمل ينتمي إلى الروح
هذا هو الفرق . يتحاور الاثنان و يثير أحدهما الآخر أو يطمئنه
و لكن لكل منهما حلم يختلف عن الآخر . تعلمت شيئاً إضافياً
هو أنه يُمكن أن تدوم توقعات الجسد طويلاً مثل أي أمل
مثل انتظار جسدي جسدك .. .
ما أن حكموا عليك بالسجن مدى الحياة مرتين , حتى توقفت
عند تصديق زمنهم
Tags: من-عايدة-إلى-كزاف
Hold Everything Dear
John BergerTo be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
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