On Berger

I'm reading John Berger at the moment - a short text entitled, "and our faces, my heart, brief as photos". The depth and fleshly poignancy of his prose and the process of his thought is extremely rare for an English man. The anglo-saxons, invaders, imperialists, marauders all, are usually weak at abstract thought, preferring the false safety of a world of facts and figures. Ask yourself this: when was there last a great British thinker? Bertrand Russell - 50 years ago? Is that all we can come up with? The English (and Anglo-Saxons elswhere across the Atlantic) are a nation of quizzers - in pubs, on telly etc. Abstract thought frightens them. Which is why it is so refreshing to read passages like this:

"The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering.

A famine is a tragic cluster of events. To which the Great Plough is indifferent, existing as it does in another time."

Of course, Berger is an exceptional English man - a true European (he left the dark and dank island many years ago for a French life near the Swiss Alps).