John Berger 1926 - 2017

"The reason why writers fail when they attempt to evoke horror is that horror is something invented after the fact, when one is recreating the experience over again in the memory. Horror does not manifest itself in the world of reality."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Wind, Sand, and Stars"

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John Berger 1926 - 2017

John Berger passed away yesterday and I'm sad. He was very old. The way he wrote about art was heart-wrenching. You could really tell he was in love. He could look at a painting and tell you it was about love, and talk about love and make it sound exquisite.

On Grünewald:
"It is painted inch by inch. No contour, no cavity, no rise within the contours, reveals a moment's flickering of the intensity of depiction. Depiction is pinned to the pain suffered. Since no part of the body escaped pain, the depiction can nowhere slack its precision. The cause of the pain is irrelevant; all that matters now is the faithfulness of the depiction. This faithfulness came from the empathy of love.

"Love bestows innocence. It has nothing to forgive. The person loved is not the same as a person crossing the street or washing her face. Nor exactly the same as a person living his (or her) life experience, for he (or she) cannot remain innocent. 

Who then is the person loved? A mystery, whose identity is confirmed by nobody except the lover. How well Dostoevsky saw this. Love is solitary even though it joins."

I want to copy some more but I don't really have time to.

I want to look at art and feel and see that it makes me feel, and know how it makes me feel and why, and articulate it. But I can only look at art and feel and not know how to explain it.