John Berger - someone to look up to....

I feel John Berger’s death (at age 90) very personally since he has accompanied me for most of my life….I vividly remember his (black and white) television documentary in the early 1970s - Ways of seeing - whose very title indeed continues to echo in my head and has influenced my writing inrecent years. The book can be read here in full…..

He was a writer who used words to craft sensitive stories about both artists and peasants (he lived in a village in the Haute Savoie from 1974) but was, for me, at his most powerful in two books he wrote with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr –

- A Fortunate Man (1967) which followed the life and travails of an English country doctor and which can be read in its entirety here

- A Seventh Man (1975) which looked at the fate of immigrants in post-war Europe….

His writing, like the man we saw in later interviews, was extraordinarily thoughtful – not for him the slick phrases which pass for most interviews these days. Words were magic and needed to be weighed carefully….I was amazed to find, as I googled for the Berger resource I have put together below, a virtual conversation Noam Chomsky had with him in 2014

A John Berger resource

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/06/i-think-dead-are-us-john-berger-88

http://www.drb.ie/new-books/a-fortunate-man

http://designobserver.com/feature/on-my-shelf-a-classic-by-berger-and-mohr/32608

http://www.drb.ie/essays/what-lies-behind

thesis on Berger https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstream/2381/30264/1/U155538.pdf

the art of looking 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IeBcecwcQw

about time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USzGCdoLhjQ
https://lithub.com/why-look-at-art-when-you-could-watch-tv/

Beautiful Books

Neagu Djuvara is a Romanian intellectual with a striking history (he's 97 years old) and has just produced a Brief Illustrated History of Romanians which immediately goes into my short list of “beautiful books”.

To qualify for this honour, a book has to fit standards none too easy to specify – such as paper type (thickish and rough), format, balance of text and illustrations, typeface, graphics and textual content. 
Book cover design, however, for me is an overrated art.

In principle, art and cookery books should be beautiful – but their glossiness is usually offputting – Beaneaters and Bread Soup and Food from Plenty are exceptions. And travel books should be attractive eg the Pallas Athene books on Czechoslovakia (out of print) and Romania.

John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man (Penguin 1969) is probably top of my list of beautiful books. Its perhaps significant that its pictures are in black and white – as, naturally, is Andre Kertesz’s On Reading (see also here)

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel is also a treat - both for content and visual impact.

As someone who can spend a few hundred euros on a single painting, I should probably be willing to pay more then 20 euros for a book - and be more demanding in my requirements of books. Indeed, having (self-)published several little books, it is probably time again to venture down that path - this time perhaps producing a "beautiful book"!  

It was only a few years back that I realised that I had become a collector – initially of various small objects which appealed to me in the various countries I visited. Painted boxes; wooden spoons; ceramics; figurines and sculptures....Curiously, some of my favourite objects are (empty) notebooks – products of those countries which craft superb specimens of such wood/paper products eg Italy, Latvia and Bulgaria. I succumbed only yesterday to such a notebook – Chinese, I have to confess, this time and for 2 euros only! One of them is shown in the 20 November post.

Winter was curiously dry in this part of the world. Little rain – let alone snow – apart from a few days in January - with Bucharest having a metre of the stuff for a couple of weeks. I drove up to Bucharest on 1 March – spring’s official opening which has been marked since then by continuous rain. At least the farmers will be happy!

Rediscovering civic bonds?

I missed the Romanian Book Fair of November but there is currently a small Christmas book fair for a week in the Peasant Museum nearby - where I picked up a copy of Alain De Botton’s most recent book – Religion for Atheists (2012) - also Orhan Pamuk’s early Silent House; and 2 translations into Romanian (Louis de Bernieres’s Captain’s Corot’s Mandolin; and de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy) (2000)

Critics tend to take a condescending view of de Botton (inasmuch as they bother with him at all) which says a lot about them. I’m half way into his book and find it one of the most interesting non-fiction books I’ve read this year ...And what a charming and well-written book compared with the hard, unforgiving stuff which comes from atheists (I've always counted myself an agnostic). 
Parts of it remind me of Theodor Zeldin’s Intimate History of Humanity (copies of which I used to give to people); and other parts of The CharacterStrengths and Virtues Handbook edited a decade ago by Martin Seligman

The first link to the book gives a positive review which captures the appeal of the book rather nicely -

....throughout the book he identifies areas where he believes secular society fails to provide community or help people cope with challenges in their lives, and points to religious practices and institutions which nonreligious people might wish to appropriate to fill the gap. Indeed, de Botton’s approach to religion seems fueled by a profound disenchantment with modern secular society, which he views as impoverished by the loss of practices and modes of thought that religion colonized.

“The challenge facing atheists,” de Botton claims, “is how to reverse the process of religious colonization: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious institutions which have laid claim to them but don’t truly own them.” Religion offers “well-structured advice on how to lead our lives,” which de Botton contends the secular world often fails to provide. The challenge for modern atheists is to offer such structure (and rituals) in a non-religious way.

De Botton examines ten areas in which valuable insights may be derived from religious practices, and gives numerous creative suggestions as to how the secular world might reclaim them eg

• Noting how religions use food to bring strangers together in a structured way, he offers the “Agape Restaurant,” in which diners will be encouraged to meet new people and share aspects of their inner lives.

• He notices that religious values and even consumer products, harnessing the arts and music, are branded and promoted far more passionately and effectively than secular values, which raises powerful questions regarding how well humanists are spreading their ideas.

• He proposes that university lecturers might be trained to present their ideas as passionately and dramatically as Pentecostal preachers — a proposal that this graduate student (and veteran of countless dreary lectures) finds delightfully provocative (if somewhat absurd).

The very format of the book is an example of the approach De Botton is trying to encourage - at least every fourth page consists of a black and white photograph (here it reminds me of the wonderful A Fortunate Man (1967) by John Berger and Jean Mohr). 
In combination with the clarity and beauty of the text and the double spacing, this makes the book highly accessible!
And this more extended assessment also summarises the argument well -

We are seldom encouraged officially to be nice to one another. It offends our libertarian beliefs and risks paternalism. JS Mill said the only grounds for state interference in people’s lives is to prevent them harming others – not for their own good. Religions however have never held back. Libertarians doubt we can know what virtue is, or how to instil it in others – they have no moral bedrock. The only exception is childrearing, where parents do favour intervention over neutrality in their desire to bring up their children. And yet the results are not good – freedom does not always bring only good things; ‘our deepest wish may be that someone would come along and save us from ourselves.’

Religions however do offer guidance on how to live. They know that to sustain goodness we need an audience – it helps to know someone is watching (most marriages would work better if we thought that!). Clergy may tend to speak as if they alone were in possession of maturity and moral authority – but Christianity acknowledges that we are actually all infantile, incomplete and unfinished – and calls it Original Sin. It creates a moral atmosphere in which people point out their flaws to one another and look for improvement in their behaviour. Fresco painters put up virtues and vices as models and warnings – eg Scrovegni Chapel.

 What would it be like if we had similar images on advertising hoardings – eg advocating Forgiveness?Atheists tend to pity the inhabitants of religiously dominated societies for the extent of the propaganda they have to endure, but this is to overlook secular societies' equally powerful and continuous calls to prayer.

A libertarian state truly worthy of the name would try to redress the balance of messages that reach its citizens away from the merely commercial and towards a holistic conception of flourishing.

True to the ambitions of Giotto's frescoes, these new messages would render vivid to us the many noble ways of behaving that we currently admire so much and so blithely ignore… We don't only need reminders of the advantages of savoury snacks. p88 

This post about the "10 essential virtues" gives a good summary of what "secular" as distinct from "religious" or "commercial" values mean. In my next post I will give excerpts about the book's key chapter on Education...