e333mily's review against another edition
5.0
reading berger feels like watching ducks swim across a clear lake & tracing the ripples they leave behind in the water. spacious. clarifying. and so so beautiful. i will treasure this book forever.
“[Poems] bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been…that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.”
“In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.”
“Poetry can repair no loss but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by a continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered.”
“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together…It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.”
“[Poems] bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been…that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.”
“In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.”
“Poetry can repair no loss but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by a continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered.”
“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together…It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.”
lookhome's review against another edition
5.0
A lovely read. John Berger continues to astound, inspire and dissect the wide ranging world of aesthetics.
- Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night (8)
-In reality we are always between two times: that of the body and that of consciousness. Hence the distinction made in all other cultures between body and soul. The soul is first, and above all, the locus of another time (10)
-There is no point in using death to simplify ourselves (15)
-They had attained a kind of a complete incompleteness (20)
-All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known (21)
-In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication (22)
-Poetry can speak of immortality because it abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present, and future (22)
- A painting only has a beginning and an end insofar as it is a physical object: within its imagery there is neither beginning nor end. This is what makes possible pictorial composition, harmony, form. (27)
- Could it not be that the stillness of the painted image speaks of timelessness? (27)
-What the past, the present and the future share is a substratum, a ground of timelessness (28)
-Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal or the timeless (31)
-Wordlessness means everything is continuous (32)
-What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes. (33)
-The body ages. The body is preparing to die. No theory of time offers a reprieve here. Death and time we always in alliance. Time took away more or less slowly: death more or less suddenly (36)
-Time has become Death triumphant over all (37)
-With the advance of remorseless time and space, the past becomes lost and falls into nothingness... God abandons life, to inhabit the eternal domain of death (37)
-Time becomes both a sentence and a punishment (38)
-The modern era of quantifications begins with algebra and infinite series. It follows that one no longer counts what one has, but what one has not. Everything becomes loss. (38)
-In the west, as the culture of capitalism abandons its claim to be a culture and becomes nothing more than Instant-Practice, the force of time is pictured as the supreme and unopposed annihilator (38)
The visible has been and still remains the principal human source of information about the world (50)
-Philosophy is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere (Novalis)
-Emigration, forced of chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time (55)
-There is no longer any dark (59)
-Meanwhile, we live not just our own lives but the longings of our century (67)
-Human happiness is rare. There are no happy periods, only happy moments (70)
-Partir est mourir un peu (78)
-His darkness smells of candles
-What in our single beds do we know of poetry?
-Home is the return to where distance did not yet count
- Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night (8)
-In reality we are always between two times: that of the body and that of consciousness. Hence the distinction made in all other cultures between body and soul. The soul is first, and above all, the locus of another time (10)
-There is no point in using death to simplify ourselves (15)
-They had attained a kind of a complete incompleteness (20)
-All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known (21)
-In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication (22)
-Poetry can speak of immortality because it abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present, and future (22)
- A painting only has a beginning and an end insofar as it is a physical object: within its imagery there is neither beginning nor end. This is what makes possible pictorial composition, harmony, form. (27)
- Could it not be that the stillness of the painted image speaks of timelessness? (27)
-What the past, the present and the future share is a substratum, a ground of timelessness (28)
-Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal or the timeless (31)
-Wordlessness means everything is continuous (32)
-What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes. (33)
-The body ages. The body is preparing to die. No theory of time offers a reprieve here. Death and time we always in alliance. Time took away more or less slowly: death more or less suddenly (36)
-Time has become Death triumphant over all (37)
-With the advance of remorseless time and space, the past becomes lost and falls into nothingness... God abandons life, to inhabit the eternal domain of death (37)
-Time becomes both a sentence and a punishment (38)
-The modern era of quantifications begins with algebra and infinite series. It follows that one no longer counts what one has, but what one has not. Everything becomes loss. (38)
-In the west, as the culture of capitalism abandons its claim to be a culture and becomes nothing more than Instant-Practice, the force of time is pictured as the supreme and unopposed annihilator (38)
The visible has been and still remains the principal human source of information about the world (50)
-Philosophy is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere (Novalis)
-Emigration, forced of chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time (55)
-There is no longer any dark (59)
-Meanwhile, we live not just our own lives but the longings of our century (67)
-Human happiness is rare. There are no happy periods, only happy moments (70)
-Partir est mourir un peu (78)
-His darkness smells of candles
-What in our single beds do we know of poetry?
-Home is the return to where distance did not yet count
surabhichatrapathy's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
isungofchaos's review against another edition
5.0
no book has ever moved me as much as this one, its beauty brought tears to my eyes multiple times
kcnoun's review against another edition
4.0
i feel like if i knew anything about art or aesthetic principles this would be my favorite book of all time, and berger writes about them in a way that makes me want to learn more about them. as it is, i find the poems and essays on home, loss, and love to be more engaging than the rest of this, but it's all pretty unbelievably beautiful.
angleandco's review against another edition
5.0
Unexpectedly, almost intolerably moving. I'm sure I'll pick this up again. And again.
chaicroissant's review against another edition
3.0
Wish I could understand this better, but whatever little I did blew me away because of its simultaneous brevity and eloquence.
margaret_adams's review against another edition
5.0
I had to fight with this book at first: whole swaths of it I found opaque, evocative but not clear. Then it just opened up for me, catching me totally off-guard. It turned from an intellectual undertaking into a love-letter that had me reading with my hand over my mouth in the middle of a cafe.
I understood this book more on the expressive plane where I know exactly how it made me feel, but I don't have a solid grasp of all of the underlying technical elements. I most enjoyed the meditations on consciousness, on the construction of time, on language, Van Gogh, emigration and displacement, and love. I finished it and thought, I should re-read this. But Berger has written so much that perhaps I should just keep going with his other work instead.
I understood this book more on the expressive plane where I know exactly how it made me feel, but I don't have a solid grasp of all of the underlying technical elements. I most enjoyed the meditations on consciousness, on the construction of time, on language, Van Gogh, emigration and displacement, and love. I finished it and thought, I should re-read this. But Berger has written so much that perhaps I should just keep going with his other work instead.