Artist, art critic, novelist, painter and author, John Berger has always fascinated me. He spans the world of words and lines/form with the same ease, and effortlessly builds bridges between the two. Modigliani, Goya, Mayakovsky, Leopardi, Danilo Dolci, Caravaggio, essays on leaving home, storytelling, art, colors, food, feelings, poetry.....one can never predict what one will come across in his books. He has written so much about seeing and sight - and he amply proves that if one can truly see, there are no boundaries to what worlds one can enter.
"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."
"That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe."
"The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget."
"The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying."
For more excerpts, click the label 'John Berger' below this post.
*Photo from Google Images
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