It was a casual whim a day ago: to turn an e-mail reply-in-progress into a short t&p blog piece on Lust. At the last minute the piece underwent a name change with the realization that: “Hey! There might be a series in this…”¹

Little did we realize that our opportunity to explore a second deadly sin would arise so soon. Nor did we expect that our musings on this sin, like those on lust, would be triggered by a recent piece (this one about John Berger) in The Guardian.

At the last board meeting the editoral collective took a vote and by a large majority it was agreed that, if there is one living writer that we envy, it is John Berger.

There are many writers that we envy, of course, but Berger currently jostles at the top of the heap. What is enviable about John Berger? There’s his novel To The Wedding for starters, and a small collection of essays with the wonderful title And our faces, my heart, brief as photos (to be republished by Bloomsbury on April 15). Berger’s writing has a perfect balance of heart and head; he has the eye of someone tuned to the nuances of nature; and his sentences flow across the pages with a poet’s grace. Susan Sontag said of him that

not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.

Then there’s the fact that he has lived simply in a village of the Haute Savoie region of the French Alps for thirty years; we, too, would like to live simply in the Haute Savoie.

The Guardian article is lead-in to a month-long celebration of Berger’s life and work which is to begin in London on April 11. The website www.johnberger.org has full information on the events which are to take place. We wish that we could afford to send a representative.

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¹ Members of the t&p editorial collective are always on the lookout for fresh ideas, new fancies to distract and amuse our legion of faithful subscribers. The countless hours we spend scouring the world’s great literature; the full-scale foraging expeditions we commission to the darkest, least-visited regions of the local library; the constant risk of painful neck-cricks and death-by-dust-inhalation as we make our weary way from one sag-shelved used book store to another…

We hope that both of you are appreciative.