And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos may be the most original of John Berger’s books; certainly, it is among the most moving. A meditation on first and last things, it is divided into two parts, one reflecting on humanity’s relation to time, the other on our place in space. “Once,” the first part is called, and like fairy tales, the sections that follow, encompassing essays, stories, and passages of plainspoken poetry, echo that initial once, as Berger contemplates the ways in which death and love and sex and life revolve around each other in human existence and find expression in art and work and the observances of daily life.

Part two, called “Here,” investigates the idea of home in a world where capitalism has rendered everyone homeless, not only the countless people who, over the last two centuries and ever more now, have been driven by need to leave their native ground for strange cities and suburbs and slums, but also the well-to-do and the rich, content to exchange the reality of home for the fungibility of property. Against such backgrounds, Berger considers the role of storytelling and the power of poetry and painting, and above all—because a letter addressed to the absent beloved resonates throughout the pages of this book—is the renewing and unsettling persistence of love and desire.