John Berger _ Hold Everything Dear

JOHN BERGER _ Hold Everything Dear

이 책은 몇년 전 로스앤젤레스에서 구매했는데 유명하지도 않고, 번역되지도 않은 책이라 존재도 모르던 책이다. 존버거의 책은 전부 다 알고 있는 줄 알았는데. 사진 속 게티센터에서 천천히 몇 장 읽은 기억이 아직도 선명하다. 높은 지대에 근사한 기둥으로 둘러쌓인 건축가의 감각적인 장소에서. 이 장소가 주는 고요함이 책보다 더 묵직했다. 두번째 사진은 그로부터 몇년 후 미국과 베트남, 다시 파리로의 여행을 함께 한 이책의 마지막 페이지를 덮던 날. 마리옹을 기다리던 꺄브에서. 정확히 기억나지는 않지만 수전손택이나 롤랑바르트와 나란히 놓여있었을 법한 큰 갤러리의 예술비평 서가에 꽂혀있던 책이였던 것 같다. 나는 그의 팬이기도하고 그의 아포리즘은 한국어와 영어 원서로도 익숙해서 읽지 않은 책을 읽는 중인데도 이미 그가 쓸 법한 문장을 마주하는 느낌의 연속이었다. 로리무어는 “문학의 유효한 주제는 하나뿐이다. 인생이 당신을 실망시킬 것이라는 사실.”이란 시니컬한 문장을 썼는데 존버거는 그럼에도 불구하고 실망시키지 않을 것이라는 사실들로 문단을 엮어낸다. 

 

The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In this core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness. p.3

 

Not all desires lead to freedom, but freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen and pursued. p.8

 

Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of rich.

 

Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, and encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. all is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief. p.103

 

 

And the sum of the choices is a person’s destiny.

 

Month by month, millions leave their homelands. They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything, which does not offer enough to feed their children. Once it did. This is the poverty of the new capitalism.

After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof. p.120

 

More than thirty years ago, Guy Debord prophetically wrote: ‘the accumulation of mass-produced commodities for the abstract space of the market, just as it has smashed all regional and legal barriers, and all corporate restrictions of Middle Ages that maintained the quality of artisanal production, has also destroyed the autonomy and quality of places.’

The key term of the present global chaos is de-or re-localization. This does not only refer to the practice of moving production to wherever labour is cheapest and regulations minimal. p.121

 

Yet clients are defined by where they check out and pay, not by where live and die