what is small with what is large, what is near with what is distant.

Having previously read one book of Berger’s, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, and that slender book having made a lasting impact on me, I was pretty keen to dig into Pig Earth. It’s effects on me were strikingly similar. I mean “lasting impact” in the expansive sense, not just for the gorgeous ideas but also for the way those ideas are transmitted: never have I read observations of life and the world that so cleanly, so concisely point to the higher truths surrounding them; nor, conversely, have I encountered philosophy so rooted in the visual. And so, in the space of one sentence, I’ve spilled my two primary trails of thought about this hard and lovely writer, for Berger’s tightly bound formula of observation and revelation makes for a kind of critical examination by itself, such that anything I might want to say about it seems hopelessly secondary and relative, and therefore just barely-but-yes interesting enough for me to say.

Coping is funny—it may be understandable, and rarely are its motivations very complex; but never, in my experience, anyway, does coping come from or lead directly to any kind of knowledge or surrender that is admirable. What I'm doing now is something else, something i am good at --- radiating context: I can be an awful and disconnected shit, can go around acting all crammed by my own inertia, and that’s truthfully where I was when I picked up this book. Another true thing is that Berger made me read all the way to page six before changing the rest of my week:

In any case experience folds upon itself, refers backwards and forwards to itself through the referents of hope and fear; and, by the use of metaphor, which is at the origin of language, it is continually comparing like with unlike, what is small with what is large, what is near with what is distant.

My fall quarter’s critical paper was about metaphor, as will be next quarter’s, and though I’d been researching and reading for weeks and had the firm start of an outline, inertia had swallowed my enjoyment of it, as it had most else in my life. And there, in the space of one goddam sentence, is Berger not only tossing off the core of my thesis but also pointing me to the balance point in my self-made pathos. The fall introduced me to a new saint, Simone Weil, and now here in the winter, in Berger, I’ve been handed some candles and sat down at the altar of another.