I’ve been thinking about time again.

I’ve been thinking about time, and about space; I’ve been thinking about life and death. I’ve been thinking about memory.

I’ve been thinking about what happens to our memories after death, as well as the memories that others have of us.

I’ve been thinking about what we will leave behind.

John Berger—Marxist art critic, poet and novelist, screenwriter and essayist—passed away in Paris on January 2nd of this year at the age of 90. Berger was one of my favourite writers—though to put it this way seems banal, a trivialization of the high opinion and the deep respect I had come to have for his insights and for his evident humanity, a regard which had extended over such a length of time, and had found its confirmation in so many of his books, that it had become a kind of love.

Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos begins: “Part One is about Time. Part Two is about Space,” and continues: “Once upon a time.”

This was the first of Berger’s books I'd read, the text a collage of brief, dreamlike scenes, which alternate with philosophical asides that do not at first seem to be connected. The writing fascinated me: confident, and filled with slightly cryptic statements whose meaning was elusive. “The likely duration of a life is a dimension of its organic structure. There is no way of comparing the time of the hare with that of the tortoise except by using an abstraction which has nothing to do with either.” And: “Time was death’s agent and one of life’s constituents. But the timeless—that which death could not destroy—was another.” I enjoyed the sense of almost knowing what Berger meant, a feeling that there was a truth imbedded in the words, which, with patience and persistence, would be revealed to me. It was a matter of trust. I knew that, with Berger, I was in good hands.

There was also this passage, addressed to an unnamed lover: “What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. […] It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does.”

I’ve been thinking about the bardo, that region outside time and space, where, Tibetan Buddhists believe, the soul goes immediately after death, where it lingers, unmoored and confused by the new surroundings, as it attempts to get its bearings once again.

YouTube is also a kind of limbo, filled with disembodied spirits trapped in moments that are scattered across time and space, condemned to repeat themselves forever. It is a proof by demonstration of the model of time proposed by the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, who believe that “all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist”; and that “when a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past.”

On YouTube it seems as if John Berger, freed by death from the constraints of a body that required him to be present in only one place, and one moment in time, is now able to be everywhere—everywhen—at once. In clips from Ways of Seeing, Berger’s landmark documentary series on art, from 1972, we see him always wearing the same oddly-patterned shirt, sporting the same unruly hair; we see him discussing storytelling with Susan Sontag, continuing a conversation that began in 1983; we see him on the BBC in 1985, with grey in his hair, delivering a visual essay on time. It could be said that John Berger now inhabits time more completely than he ever did in life.

One of Berger’s YouTube incarnations is a 2016 documentary by Cordelia Dvorak. At about the thirty minute mark we meet Louis, a long-time friend of Berger’s in Quincy, the farming village of the Haute-Savoie where Berger lived for over forty years. As we look on, Louis sharpens a weathered scythe, and then—bent with age, slowly, awkwardly—uses it to mow a patch of tall grass studded with purple flowers. Later (youtu.be/e3VhbsXk9Ds?t=41m59s), Louis leans on the scythe, and, smiling self-consciously, looks directly into the camera, speaks through it, across space (and, we see now, in the aftermath of Berger’s death: across time as well), saying: “We miss you, John! When will you come to Quincy for a visit? Just for a day.”

That “Just for a day” breaks the heart: an echo of Orpheus’s plea to Hades, asking for the safe return of his beloved Eurydice from the underworld.

Berger—Berger’s body—did return to Quincy for burial, the ceremony taking place on January 7th, 2017, in the crowded cemetery in Mieussy, the town nearest to the village of Quincy, and to the farm house where Berger had lived (and where his son Yves now lives with his family).

While in his coffin Berger was sketched by Yves, as Berger himself had done upon the death of his father in 1976. John Berger wrote about that moment, alone with his father’s body, in an essay published in his collection The White Bird, reflecting that “I was the last ever to look upon the face I was drawing.” The sketch by Yves of his father is reproduced in a moving tribute to Berger written by Tom Overton, Berger’s archivist and biographer, which is published online at frieze.com/article/john-berger-1926-2017

I’ve been thinking about inspiration, how a writer can inspire others to thought or to action, using nothing more than a sequence of their words upon a page. Inspiration: a breathing in; a taking in of spirit.

Remarkable that words on a page can contain a breath, and that that breath can be transmitted to another: across time, and across space. Remarkable that even someone who is now dead, continues to breath in this fashion, through what they’ve left behind, their words animating and inspiring the living from somewhere beyond the grave.

John Berger was a writer of conscience and integrity who found, in many countries on several continents, an appreciative and devoted readership, a number of whom eventually became writers themselves (and frequently, in addition: collaborators, colleagues, and friends). Every writer should be so fortunate.

The Endnotes section of issue 104 of Geist will contain reviews of several recent books by and about John Berger.