John Berger / Ways of Being

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello. 

• FEBRUARY 3, 2020

Ways of Being

John Berger’s life between aesthetics and politics.

BRUCE ROBBINS

This article appears in the February 17, 2020 issue.

So vegetables are politics now!” The line is pronounced by a character in Alain Tanner’s 1976 film Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, a film that bids farewell to the political hopes of 1968 but somehow manages to be upbeat. John Berger, the English art critic, novelist, and universal man of letters who cowrote the film with Tanner, also managed to sustain an almost magical political buoyancy in the grim and uncertain years that followed the ’60s—and, like the character in Tanner’s film, he seems to have done so in part through vegetables, as well as animals, relocating so as to live in proximity to both.