emily’s Reviews > A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger > Status Update

'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’—.'