John Berger: a writer of beauty, grace and power

"Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma. The G8's dogma is that the making of profit has to be mankind's guiding principle before which everything else from the traditional past or aspiring future must be sacrificed as illusion"
John Berger (from an article in The Guardian)

There are few better writers than John Berger. He writes beautifully and with such economy of words. I am re-reading his 2007 book of essays Hold Everything Dear; Dispatches on Survival and Resistance and his 2009 piece A Place Weeping in which he writes about the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The latter is a powerful and moving piece of writing.

I wrote an earlier piece on Berger's article (here) and other pieces on my love of Darwish's poetry.