John Berger is dead
The new year is already continuing in the style of 2016. John Berger died yesterday — January 2nd — to add a cruel coda to 2016.
John Berger was not a young man. He was 90. There is no feeling that he has been taken unduly early. And yet his passing leaves me deeply saddened. I have been reading his work in great gobbets lately and it is like having a wise mentor taken away just as you were plucking up the courage to ask him some questions and seek some personal guidance.
Simon McBurney’s refers to guidance — and friendship,too — in his moving tweet about the death:
Simon worked with Berger on The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol and appeared in the recent BBC4 profile of Berger.
I get the sense that working with Berger was often an experience that led to friendship and a long-term relationship. The accomplices highlighted in the profile bear this out.
Reading him is the same. Whether in his fiction, his art criticism, or his political or personal essays, his voice his warm, his generosity and compassion tangible. He is one of the rare voices we could turn to for sense to be made of the world.
If there is a grain of comfort at all in all this it is the fact that Berger was wonderfully prolific and there is much more for me to read.
Geoff Dyer — in the Preface to his Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger in 1986 — wrote:
While Berger is widely read, and though Ways of Seeing has been massively influential, his stature as writer and intellectual has not been adequately recognized. A map of literary reputations (though the word ‘literary’ is itself too narrow to apply to someone with Berger’s range of output) does not properly represent writers’ actual achievements.
New to Berger? Hold Everything Dear gives a sense of the man, his range of interests, and his way of looking at the world. To see the man in action — as it were — there are many videos available on Youtube. That first episode of Ways of Seeing remains groundbreaking over forty years later.
Some words from Berger himself to finish this half-assed encomium.
Prose, as a form of discourse, depends upon a minimum of established continuities of meaning; prose is an exchange with a surrounding circle of different points of view and opinions, expressed in a shared and descriptive language. And such a shared language exists no more in most public discourse. A temporary but historical loss. Confabulations, page 113
