Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

This is such a pretty and satisfying book to hold in my hand, a light paperback clean white, font and punctuation the only marks. The prose reads exactly like the interview I once watched between John Berger and a young cultural critic from the BBC. Berger was older, had retired to the Alps, lived in a tiny village where the peasant occupants gave him joy and his table was covered in red gingham and he replied to the critic’s adulatory questions in a voice that measured moments, every word weighed, leaving quiet before giving answers if he needed to take time.
If you measure the book thematically it is not connected but it clearly threads through the thoughts of one man over a certain decade. It isn’t strictly a linear decade but show more perhaps there is a certain decade of thought, dominated by 2001 at the center. “Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead” is either a religion or a writing prompt. “Undefeated Despair” is the only kind of travel writing I would like to read. “Where Are We?” diagnoses us. Of course the rest of them are good in one way or another, “From the human capacity to arrange, to place, come language and communication” (82). He has written some essays without concrete answers at the end and it is nice not to be told, neatly, what to think. This is a piece of mid-2000s, of all the despair that a soul feels when looking at what is happening, honestly, in the world at any moment one happens to be alive.
“In our exchanges, such as they are, in the midday company we offer one another, there is a substratum of what I can only describe as gratitude.” 127. This is the whole of it—a set of essays, gratitude underneath. show less

A poet translates the newspaper, taking the imediate explosions and sifting through them to find terrible urgent beauty. The book begins with an invocation to the dead, and they remain present throught the journey to fear, despair and desire. After examining the terrible kinds of survival that is to left to people who have lost everything and still live, Berger brings us to desire and its ability to create another world, a chance for something to work right, to give a reprieve from pain, even if just for a moment. Art, of course, is present, as endurance, as witness and as creation. Berger has successfully added a depth and weight to discussions of our current times.

Illuminating thoughts. Finally, it clicks.

Visceral y apasionada, esta obra aúna la más lúcida perspectiva literaria con el más reflexivo activismo político y social y sugiere el pensamiento y la acción que podrían ayudar a acabar con la injusticia y el sufrimiento en el mundo. John Berger analiza la esencia del terrorismo y el drama del desarraigo de millones de personas que se han visto obligados por la pobreza y la guerra a vivir en calidad de refugiados. Su mirada implacable ilumina la situación de Afganistán, Irak, Palestina, Serbia, Bosnia, China, Indonesia, y todos aquellos lugares donde la gente se ve privada de la más básica de las libertades. Con la esperanza entre los dientes es un polémico e incisivo retrato de nuestro tiempo, una profunda meditación show more acerca del significado actual del compromiso político. show less