NYRB will publish reprints of two John Berger books on June 16th of this year (why does that date seem so familiar?), his experimental picaresque 1972 classic G., and 1984’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photo. I’d never heard of the latter, which NYRB describes as maybe
…the most original of John Berger’s books; certainly, it is among the most moving. A meditation on first and last things, it is divided into two parts, one reflecting on humanity’s relation to time, the other on our place in space.
Here is a paragraph from the middle of G.:
You had to find a third value, a third interest that your social ambition, which, unlike pure ambition, must always wear the dress of conformity, and the idealism of your penises could acknowledge as arbiter. And this third value was property. The third interest was an interest in owning. Not a remote merely financial interest, but a passionate one which stirs you physically, which becomes a sense as acute as the sense of touch. Indeed you have seen to it that your children are taught to touch nothing that is not theirs, not a flower nor an animal nor the hand of a stranger. To touch is to claim as property. To fuck is to possess. And you take possession either by paying rent or by buying outright.
Biblioklept 