Jean Mohr

John Berger

The Story of a Country Doctor

A Fortunate Man

Marion

Any general culture acts as a mirror which enables the individual to recognize himself - or at least to recognize those parts of himself which are socially permissible. The culturally deprived have far fewer ways of recognizing themselves. A great deal of their experience - especially emotional and introspective experience - has to remain

unnamed for them. Their chief means of self-expression is consequently through action: this is one of the reasons why the English have so many 'do-it-yourself' hobbies. The garden or the work bench becomes the nearest they have to a means of satisfactory Introspection.

The easiest - and sometimes the only possible - form of conversation is that which concerns or describes action: that is to say action considered as technique or as procedure. It is then not the experience of the speakers which is discussed but the nature of an entirely exterior mechanism or event - a motor-car engine, a football match, a draining system or the workings of some committee. Such subjects, which preclude anything directly personal, supply the content of most of the conversations being carried on by men over twenty-five at any given moment in England today. (In the case of the young, the force of their own appetites saves them from such depersonalization.)

A Fortunate Man quotes

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