Status Updates From A Writer of Our Time: The L...

'As in the late Barthes, there can be a sense of privacy so intense that the prose disperses into its opposite and becomes, paradoxically, anonymous. Berger’s meditation on Caravaggio, as the painter of desire, begins in just this way: ‘One night—you asked me who was my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer. Caravaggio. My own reply surprised me.'

'As in the late Barthes, there can be a sense of privacy so intense that the prose disperses into its opposite and becomes, paradoxically, anonymous. Berger’s meditation on Caravaggio, as the painter of desire, begins in just this way: ‘One night—you asked me who was my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer. Caravaggio. My own reply surprised me.'

'Time was the corollary to place—variable presence a riddle as old as thought. ‘What, then, is time?’ wondered Augustine of Hippo. ‘If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.’ Berger—filled up notebooks with diagrams, aphorisms, quotations. He corresponded with philosophers, physicists, mystics, poets, psychologists—Time became his—muse, a conundrum, a wellspring of possibility.'

'In a state of anomie, Berger left the conference to meet a friend at the Van Gogh museum across the street. He went there not to look at the paintings—‘at this moment, I told myself, you need Van Gogh like you need a hole in the head’—.'

'In a state of anomie, Berger left the conference to meet a friend at the Van Gogh museum across the street. He went there not to look at the paintings—‘at this moment, I told myself, you need Van Gogh like you need a hole in the head’—.'

'Ways of Seeing—for (Berger) it was something of a fluke. It represented one belligerent and structuralist extreme of his style. Berger himself never considered it a major work. It was his last serious move in the polemical mode.—there are hints not only of exceptions to his rules (in the great masters of the tradition) but that perhaps it was in these exceptions that the whole raison d’être of art resides.'