💡 TL;DR：影评人 A.O. Scott 重读约翰·伯格：在注意力被明码标价的时代，伯格教的「观看之道」反而是最实用的生存技能。

The Man Who Taught Us How to Pay Attention

A.O. Scott, The New York Times Magazine, 2026-10-18（10月25日刊，第20页） https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/magazine/john-berger-attention.html

说明：中文为全文翻译；标 ★ 的段落是三联生活周刊引用的那一段。

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原文

As a critic, which is to say someone whose job is to pay attention to things, and as a reader of criticism, which means someone who pays attention to the ways attention is paid, I’ve been fixated recently on the works of John Berger.

Berger, a British art critic, novelist and political polemicist who died in 2017, devoted much of his writing life to the theory and practice of looking — at paintings, at animals, at the natural world. This wasn’t merely an aesthetic preoccupation. “You can’t talk about aesthetics,” he wrote, “without talking about the principle of hope and the existence of evil.” Attention, for him, was a matter of life and death, or at least of their cultural equivalents, remembering and forgetting.

One of my favorite Berger essays, first published in 1973, is called “Between Two Colmars.” It recounts his experience of going to see a renaissance altarpiece near that Alsatian cathedral town in 1963, and again 10 years later.

I’ve never been to Colmar, and there’s no picture of the altarpiece, which was painted by the German master Matthias Grunewald, in the edition of “About Looking” that I’m consulting. I could search online, of course (something I couldn’t have done when the piece first appeared or when I first read it a decade or so later), to see what Berger was talking about. But I don’t think I’ve ever done that, because even though he describes the altarpiece in careful detail — “It was painted on hinged panels of wood. When these were shut, those before the altar saw the Crucifixion, flanked by St. Anthony and St. Sebastian. When the panels were opened, they saw a Concert of Angels and a Madonna and Child, flanked by an Annunciation and Resurrection” — what matters to me more is his experiences of looking at it.

An artifact of early-16th-century Europe — an era experienced by many, according to Berger, as “a time of damnation” — that depicts scenes of biblical history strikes Berger as brutal and despairing when he sees it first in 1963, and as hopeful and compassionate when he revisits it. Those impressions are the mirror images of his own state of mind at the beginning and end of a period that started in personal and political optimism and ended in disorientation and defeat. The hope of the early ’60s gave him the security to embrace gloom, while the desolation of the ’70s left him in need of solace. A single work of art answered to both needs. “In a period of revolutionary expectation,” Berger concludes, “I saw a work of art which had survived as evidence of the past’s despair; in a period which has to be endured, I see the same work miraculously offering a narrow pass across despair.”

I find that sentence moving enough that I may never need to see the altarpiece for myself. The idea that art can offer a measure of hope in bad times is a commonplace these days and can easily slide toward sentimentality and escapism. But for Berger art offers not a refuge so much as a way of living in history, of grasping the complexity of the past and the individual’s changing relationship to it. The altarpiece, anchored in the facts of its own epoch — wars of religion; rapid technological change; plague and paranoia — reaches across the centuries as a reminder of the kind of meaning only art can provide.

Similarly, “Between Two Colmars” can remind a 21st-century reader of the urgency and complexity of looking at art. Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction. Berger saw this crisis coming and foresaw its consequences. In 1978, writing about photography and its impact on the modern world, he argued that the dominance of images “creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.” That diagnosis seems even truer today, as the functions of remembering, judging and interpreting are increasingly offloaded from human minds and communities into the ether of social media feeds and artificial intelligence. We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.

Berger’s centennial will arrive on Nov. 5. Almost 10 years after his death, his presence is still felt in pockets of the culture. His best-known book, “Ways of Seeing,” has been a staple of art-history classes and a fixture on the bookshelves of critically minded young people for more than half a century. New York Review Books has been steadily reissuing his fiction and criticism, including, earlier this fall, the 1980 collection “About Looking,” which includes the essay I just quoted. A new biography, by Tom Overton, has just been published, the second in a decade.

On the internet, in addition to finding his four-part BBC series “Ways of Seeing,” you can stream “The Seasons in Quincy,” a meditative documentary from 2015 in which Berger participates in a public conversation with Ben Lerner, peels apples with Tilda Swinton and offers motorcycle lessons to her daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne. Berger appears in the film as an elfin, grandfatherly figure with a mop of silver curls and piercing blue eyes — charismatic in a way that feels a little old-fashioned.

His persona on the page is not quite as playful but just as magnetic. Berger liked to think of himself as a storyteller. His fourth novel, “G.” — an earthy, experimental picaresque that often reads like “Tristram Shandy” by way of Thomas Pynchon — won the Booker Prize in 1972. He spent much of the 1970s and ’80s toiling on “Into Their Labors,” a sweeping trilogy of novels about the history and fate of European peasantry. Other books of his are hybrids — documentary, polemical, lyrical, personal — exploring history, ecology and political and economic injustice.

But it’s his essays about art and artists that matter most to me now. Reading them, you often feel you’re standing next to him in the museum or even looking through his eyes at a painting or a sculpture. You pay attention to his attention.

Berger trained as a painter before shifting to criticism. For him, attention was not a passive, individual state but rather an action. We don’t just see what’s in front of our eyes. We interpret it, looking for patterns and meanings and associations. How we do this depends on where we are, who we’re with and how we see ourselves.

This, in the abstract, was the argument of “Ways of Seeing,” both the book and the broadcast.

Berger’s mop of curls was brown in those days, his eyes no less alive. Speaking in an accent that is educated but not posh, with a tendency to melt his R’s into W’s, he zigzags through the history of art, focusing not on masterpieces and movements but on — the title sums it up.

In the excitable, democratic manner of a hip young professor (Berger never held a full-time academic post), he begins by pointing out how works of art change when they’re reproduced on postcards, merchandise and television screens. This wasn’t an entirely original observation. Berger acknowledged the influence of the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by the prewar German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, which would become a staple of the cultural studies syllabus in subsequent decades, partly thanks to the influence of “Ways of Seeing.”

The second episode, which featured a panel of feminist critics and writers, did the same for the idea of the “male gaze.” (In Berger’s summary: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”) A later installment proposed a link between the popularity of oil painting in early modern Europe and the rise of capitalism. (“Oil paintings often depict things,” he says. “Things which in reality are buyable. To have a thing painted and put on a canvas is not unlike buying it and putting it in your house. If you buy a painting, you buy also the look of the thing it represents.”)

“Ways of Seeing” popularized an approach to art — and to culture more generally — that has since become ubiquitous. Rather than focusing on the achievement of individual artists or on the traditions that connect them, this approach insists on context: the social forces that shape artists and schools; the relationships among art, money and power; the ways that making and appreciating are mediated by history, ideology and institutions.

By now the frisson of new awareness that greeted the first viewers of “Ways of Seeing” has been experienced by several generations of readers. The notion that art is socially embedded is such a piece of conventional wisdom that it can be hard to imagine what the alternative view might have been. And there is a facile, debunking version of the argument, one that promises an easy kind of mastery, an ability to see through art instead of seeing it, a substitution of knowingness for aesthetic experience. Reams of criticism have been written exposing the complicity of countless artists and artworks with colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy and every other system of domination. Berger is never not aware of those connections — and does not hesitate to judge the political and moral failings of artists — but he always puts the experience of making and viewing the art first.

★ For him, the act of looking — the artist’s and the spectator’s — carries primal human impulses of curiosity, pleasure and awe. While art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, neither is it reducible to politics or commerce or anything else. An oil painting may be an object, a commodity in the marketplace, but it’s never only that. It is also the expression of the painter’s subjectivity, the work of hands that reach across time and geography to find receptive eyes. And to communicate a utopian possibility: “Art,” he wrote, “supposes that beauty is not an exception — is not in despite of — but is the basis for an order.”

Even as the world of commodities is ruled by equivalence, part of the allure of a painting lies in its uniqueness. A Caravaggio is not the same as a Courbet. You can’t swap Picasso for Francis Bacon. What that means is that art — even art that is anonymously made or consumed en masse — is personal. Somebody made it. Somebody sees it.

This idealism — often described, by him and others, as humanism — is what separates Berger from the postmodernist strain of critical thought that “Ways of Seeing” in other ways anticipates. It’s also what gives his art criticism moral force and political relevance.

Like many other British intellectuals of his background and generation, Berger, a child of the London middle class with some Jewish ancestry, gravitated leftward during and after World War II. He never joined the British Communist Party; his Marxism provided less a body of doctrine than a set of prompts and hunches. He was biased in favor of realism and suspicious of abstraction; he found traces of class struggle in every corner of the history of art; he mined the lives of painters for clues about the social implications of their work. When he won the Booker Prize in 1972, he made headlines (and enemies) by donating half the prize money to the British Black Panthers — to draw attention to the prize funders’ role in colonialism and the slave trade.

But in the second half of his career, Berger’s leftist principles — his hatred of inequality, his reverence for labor, his conviction that a more human alternative to capitalism was possible — were increasingly filtered through a sensibility tinted with conservatism. He grew skeptical of modernity and acutely aware of the costs of technological progress, which brings in its wake dispossession, alienation and amnesia along with efficiency, speed and convenience. While he would remain engaged in a familiar array of leftist causes until the end of his life, his center of gravity shifted radically in the ’70s and ’80s because of his intensifying connection to rural life.

While working on a documentary project about migrant laborers with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, Berger discovered that most of the people he interviewed had been small farmers or agricultural workers uprooted from land where their families lived for generations. He realized that he had no way to understand that background, even though it was shared by (in his estimate) hundreds of millions of people around the world.

He had spent time in the French countryside before, but in the mid-’70s, he relocated permanently to Haute-Savoie in the French Alps, settling in Quincy, a remote hamlet, and making his life among the peasants there.

Plenty of writers move to the country, seeking refuge or respite from the swirl of metropolitan literary life. Berger’s rustication was a more serious and sustained project. After moving to Quincy, he would devote much of his creative and critical energy to witnessing and trying to explain to himself and his readers the contours of a mode of existence in the process of vanishing, and to understanding why that vanishing mattered. He came to believe that an essential piece of human experience was disappearing from memory.

Go back far enough in your family tree, and you are likely to find people who can be classified as peasants. Small-scale farming, supplemented by cottage industry, handicraft, hunting and foraging, has organized much of human life for most of our history as a species. From his neighbors in Quincy, Berger extrapolated the intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the peasant world — its distinctive understanding of a person’s relationships with animals, family, nature and the dead.

To the extent that Berger’s point of view is contradictory, a perspective that ties the desire for a better future with a stubborn attachment to the past, it’s summed up in the figure of the peasant, a human type that is both ubiquitous and nearly invisible for much of human recorded history. “Very few peasants become artists,” he noted. “This is not a question of talent, but of opportunity and free time.” As a result, “the peasant’s soul is as unfamiliar or unknown to most urban people as is his physical endurance and the material conditions of his labor.”

In the European literature and art Berger knew best, people who work the land, if they are present at all, tend to be subjected to mockery, pity or sentimental idealization, all of which are forms of condescension. This isn’t just a matter of metropolitan prejudice or bourgeois elitism. The 19th-century French realist Jean-François Millet was for Berger a “unique” artist: “No other European painter had treated rural labor as the central theme of his art.” But he was nonetheless a failure “because the language of traditional oil painting could not accommodate the subject he brought with him.” That is because landscape painting and rural portraiture are based on observational detachment. In this tradition, Millet found “no formula for representing the close, harsh, patient physicality of a peasant’s labor on, instead of in front of, the land.”

Berger’s own essays, which approach the question of peasant experience more abstractly and obliquely, may come closer to capturing its importance. Exploring the question “Why look at animals?” (in an essay of the same title collected in “About Looking”), Berger zeros in on an essential aspect of the human connection to other species by observing that “a peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.”

Berger had a romantic streak, but he didn’t sentimentalize life on the land or paint a nostalgic picture of an existence defined by grueling labor, frequent hardship and particular vulnerability to natural and economic disaster. The question he asked — of the migrants and displaced rural people he encountered in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and of modern civilization as a whole — was: What happens when that continuity is disrupted, when that sense of place, of home, of animals as a source of companionship and labor and food, is lost?

The answer goes back to his criticism. The peasant’s survival depends on attention: to the weather; to customs and traditions; to a host of practical considerations that are also aesthetic and ethical choices. How do you plant a field? Build a chair? Raise a child? Mourn the dead?

The knowledge that provides answers to those questions is acquired by paying attention, in a way that is not qualitatively different from what a painter brings to a landscape or a critic to a painting.

That is what we are at risk of losing. Or what, Berger might say, is being stolen from us, not least by the technologies that offer us endless novelty and seem to fulfill desires we never even knew we had. The loss is a foreclosure of memory, of the knowledge that we exist in history. It’s not abstract: The rage that defines so much modern politics, in the developed world and the global South, on the right as well as on the left, can be understood as a reaction to the feeling that something we once had is gone. Grief manifests itself as grievance.

Art — and art criticism, for that matter — suggest a fragile, conditional alternative. As Berger put it: “We live in a world of suffering in which evil is rampant, a world whose events do not confirm our Being, a world that has to be resisted. It is in this situation that the aesthetic moment offers hope.”

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中文全文

那个教我们如何专注的人

作为一个批评家——也就是说，一个工作就是留心事物的人——同时作为一个批评的读者——也就是说，一个留心别人如何留心的人——我最近迷上了约翰·伯格的作品。

伯格是英国的艺术批评家、小说家、政治论战者，2017 年去世。他写作生涯的大部分时间，都在琢磨观看的理论与实践：看画，看动物，看自然世界。这并不只是审美上的关切。“你不可能不谈希望的原则和恶的存在，“他写道，“就去谈美学。“对他而言，注意力是生死攸关的事——至少也是其文化等价物：记住与遗忘。

我最喜欢的一篇伯格文章叫《在两个科尔马之间》，1973 年首次发表。文章讲他 1963 年去阿尔萨斯那座主教座堂附近看一幅文艺复兴祭坛画，十年后又去看了一次。

我没去过科尔马。我手边这本《看》里也没有那幅祭坛画的图片——画是德国大师马蒂亚斯·格吕内瓦尔德画的。当然，我可以上网搜一下（文章初次发表时，或者十几年后我第一次读到它时，我做不到这件事），看看伯格到底在说什么。但我大概从来没搜过。因为尽管他把那幅画描述得很细——“画在带铰链的木板上。合上时，祭坛前的人看到的是钉十字架，两侧是圣安东尼和圣塞巴斯蒂安。打开时，他们看到的是天使的音乐会和圣母圣婴，两侧是受胎告知与复活”——但对我来说更重要的，是他看这幅画的经历。

一件 16 世纪初欧洲的产物——据伯格说，那个时代被很多人经验为”一个诅咒的时代”——描绘着圣经历史的场景。1963 年他第一次看到它时，觉得它残酷、绝望；十年后重看，觉得它充满希望与悲悯。这些印象，是他自己心境的两面镜子：一段以个人和政治上的乐观开始、以迷失和挫败结束的时期，前后两端的心境。60 年代初的希望给了他拥抱阴郁的底气，70 年代的荒凉让他需要慰藉。同一件艺术品，同时回应了两种需要。“在一个革命的期待期，“伯格写道，“我看到一件艺术品，它活了下来，作为过去之绝望的证据；在一个只能忍受的时期，我看到同一件作品，奇迹般地提供了一条穿过绝望的窄路。”

这句话让我感动到，可能一辈子都不需要亲眼去看那幅画。艺术能在坏时代里提供一点希望——这想法今天已是老生常谈，也很容易滑向感伤和逃避。但对伯格来说，艺术提供的不是避难所，而是一种在历史中生活的方式：把握过去的复杂，以及个体与过去之间不断变化的关系。那幅祭坛画锚定在它自己时代的现实里——宗教战争、技术的剧变、瘟疫与偏执——却跨越几个世纪伸过来，提醒我们：有一种意义，只有艺术能给。

同样，《在两个科尔马之间》也能提醒 21 世纪的读者：看艺术这件事有多紧迫、多复杂。此刻我们正身处一场注意力危机，个人和集体都被卷进一条无限滚动的、由打断和分心构成的河流里。伯格看到了这场危机的到来，也预见了它的后果。1978 年，他写摄影及其对现代世界的冲击，说图像的统治”制造出一个即刻期待的永恒当下：记忆不再是必要的，也不再是被想要的。随着记忆的丧失，意义的连续性和判断的连续性也一并失去了。“这个诊断在今天看来更真了——记住、判断、解释这些功能，正越来越多地从人的头脑和社群中被卸载出去，卸载到社交媒体信息流和人工智能的以太里。我们有忘记如何观看的危险。

伯格的百年诞辰是 11 月 5 日。他去世将近十年，影响仍在文化的若干角落里。他最著名的书《观看之道》，半个多世纪以来一直是艺术史课的必读书，也是有关怀的年轻人书架上的常客。NYRB 一直在陆续再版他的小说和批评，包括今秋早些时候出的 1980 年文集《看》——我刚引的那篇就在里面。汤姆·奥弗顿写的新传记刚刚出版，是十年里的第二本。

网上除了能找到他四集的 BBC 系列片《观看之道》，还能看到 2015 年的《昆西四季》——一部沉思式的纪录片。片子里伯格和本·勒纳做了一场公开对谈，和蒂尔达·斯文顿一起削苹果，还教她女儿霍诺学摩托车。他在片中像个精灵般的老祖父，一头银卷发，蓝眼睛锐利——那种魅力有点旧派。

他纸上的形象没那么顽皮，但一样有磁性。伯格喜欢把自己看作一个讲故事的人。他的第四本小说《G.》——一本土气的、实验性的流浪汉小说，读起来常常像品钦写的《项狄传》——1972 年拿了布克奖。70 和 80 年代的大部分时间，他都在写《他们的劳作》三部曲，一部关于欧洲农民的历史与命运的巨著。他还有一些混合体的书——纪实、论战、抒情、个人——探讨历史、生态、政治和经济的不公。

但对我来说，现在最重要的还是他写艺术和艺术家的那些文章。读它们的时候，你常常觉得自己就站在他旁边，在博物馆里，甚至是通过他的眼睛在看一幅画或一件雕塑。你在留意他的留意。

伯格先受的是画家训练，后来转向批评。对他而言，注意力不是被动的个人状态，而是一个动作。我们不只是看见眼前的东西。我们解释它，寻找模式、意义和关联。我们怎么解释，取决于我们在哪里、和谁在一起、怎么看自己。

抽象地说，这就是《观看之道》的论点——书和电视片都是。

那时候伯格的卷发还是棕色的，眼睛一样有神。他说话带着受过教育但不阔气的口音，R 音常滑成 W 音，他在艺术史里来回穿梭，不聚焦名作和流派，只聚焦——标题已经说了。

他像个兴奋的、民主的年轻教授（伯格从没担任过全职教职），一上来先指出：艺术品被复制到明信片、商品和电视屏幕上之后，发生了什么变化。这不算全新的观察。伯格承认自己受了瓦尔特·本雅明那篇《机械复制时代的艺术作品》的影响——这位战前德国犹太批评家的文章，后来成了文化研究课程的基本篇目，部分要归功于《观看之道》的影响。

第二集请了一组女性主义批评家和作家，对”男性凝视”这个概念做了同样的事。（伯格的总结是：“男人看女人。女人看自己被看。“）后面一集提出：早期现代欧洲油画的流行，与资本主义的兴起有关联。（“油画常常画东西，“他说，“现实中买得到的东西。让人把一样东西画下来、放到画布上，和把它买下来、放进自己家里，差不多是一回事。你买一幅画，也买下了它所描绘之物的样子。”）

《观看之道》普及了一种看艺术——以及更广泛地看文化——的方法，此后变得无处不在。它不聚焦单个艺术家的成就，也不聚焦连接他们的传统，而是坚持语境：塑造艺术家和流派的社会力量；艺术、金钱与权力之间的关系；创作和欣赏如何被历史、意识形态和制度中介。

当年第一批观众看《观看之道》时那种”被点醒”的战栗，如今已经过几代读者。艺术是社会嵌入的——这观念已成了常识，以至于很难想象另一种看法曾经是什么样。而这个论点还有一个省事的、拆穿式的版本：它许诺一种廉价的掌握，一种看穿艺术而不是看见艺术的能力，用”我知道”替换审美经验。大量批评文章写过无数艺术家和作品与殖民主义、资本主义、父权制以及一切统治体系的同谋。伯格从来都知道这些关联——也从不迟疑于评判艺术家在政治和道德上的失败——但他永远把创作和观看的经验放在第一位。

★ 对他来说，观看这个动作——画家的，也是观者的——携带着人类最原始的冲动：好奇、愉悦和敬畏。艺术不活在真空里，但它也不能被化约为政治、商业或任何别的东西。一幅油画可以是一件物品，市场里的一件商品，但它从来不只是这些。它也是画家主体性的表达，是一双手的作品——那双手跨越时间和地理，去寻找愿意接纳的眼睛。它还要传达一种乌托邦式的可能：“艺术，“他写道，“假定美不是例外——不是’尽管如此’——而是秩序的基础。”

即使商品世界由等价原则统治，一幅画的吸引力有一部分仍然来自它的独一无二。一幅卡拉瓦乔不是一幅库尔贝。你不能把毕加索换成弗朗西斯·培根。这意味着：艺术——即便是匿名创作或被大规模消费的艺术——是人的。有人做了它。有人看见了它。

这种理想主义——他自己和别人常称之为人文主义——把伯格与后现代那一脉批评思想区分开来，尽管《观看之道》在其他方面预演了后者。也正是这种理想主义，让他的艺术批评有道德力量和政治相关性。

和他背景、同代的许多英国知识分子一样，伯格——伦敦中产阶级的孩子，有部分犹太血统——在二战期间和之后向左转。他从未加入英国共产党；他的马克思主义与其说是一套教义，不如说是一组提示和直觉。他偏向现实主义，怀疑抽象；他在艺术史的每个角落都能找到阶级斗争的痕迹；他从画家的生平里挖掘作品社会含义的线索。1972 年拿布克奖时，他把一半奖金捐给了英国黑豹党，上了头条（也结了仇）——为的是让人注意奖项资助者在殖民主义和奴隶贸易中的角色。

但在他生涯的后半段，伯格的左派原则——对不平等的憎恨、对劳动的敬意、对”资本主义之外有更人性的替代方案”的信念——越来越多地透过一种带保守色调的感受力过滤出来。他对现代性起了怀疑，对技术进步的代价异常清醒：进步带来效率、速度和便利的同时，也带来剥夺、异化和失忆。直到生命尽头，他仍参与那些熟悉的各种左翼事业，但在 70 和 80 年代，他与乡村生活日益加深的联系，让他的重心发生了根本位移。

和瑞士摄影师让·莫尔一起做一个关于移民劳工的纪录片项目时，伯格发现，他采访的大多数人都曾是小农或农业工人，从家族世代生活的土地上被连根拔起。他意识到自己完全无法理解这种背景，尽管（据他估计）全世界有数亿人共享这种背景。

他以前也在法国乡下待过，但 70 年代中期，他永久搬到了法国阿尔卑斯山的上萨瓦省，在一个偏远的叫昆西的小村定居，在当地农民中间生活。

很多作家搬到乡下，是为了躲避或暂离大都会文学生活的漩涡。伯格的下乡是一个更认真、更持久的工程。搬到昆西之后，他把大部分创作和批评的精力用来见证一种正在消失的生存方式，并试着向自己和读者解释它的轮廓，也试着理解这种消失为什么重要。他渐渐相信，人类经验中很重要的一块，正在从记忆里消失。

家谱往前翻得够远，你大概能找到可以被归为农民的人。小规模农耕，加上家庭手工业、手工艺、狩猎和采集，在人类历史的大部分时间里组织了大部分人的生活。从昆西的邻居身上，伯格推演出农民世界在智性、审美和精神上的维度——它对人与动物、家庭、自然、死者之间关系的独特理解。

伯格的视角是矛盾的：既想要更好的未来，又顽固地依恋过去。这种矛盾集中体现在”农民”这个形象上——一个在人类有记载的历史的大部分时间里既无处不在、又几乎看不见的人群。“很少有农民成为艺术家，“他指出，“这不是天赋问题，是机会和空闲时间的问题。“结果是，“对大多数城里人来说，农民的魂灵和他身体的耐力、他劳动的物质条件一样陌生、一样不为人知。”

在伯格最熟悉的欧洲文学和艺术里，种地的人即使出现，也往往被嘲弄、被怜悯，或者被感伤地理想化——这些都是居高临下的形式。这不只是都市偏见或资产阶级精英主义。19 世纪法国写实主义者让-弗朗索瓦·米勒，在伯格看来是”独一无二”的艺术家：“没有别的欧洲画家把乡村劳动当作自己艺术的中心主题。“但他仍然是个失败者，“因为传统油画的语言容纳不下他带来的题材”。原因是，风景画和乡村肖像画建立在观察者的疏离之上。在这个传统里，米勒找不到”任何公式，去表现农民劳作时那种贴近的、粗粝的、耐心的身体性——那是在土地上，而不是在土地前面”。

伯格自己的文章，处理农民经验的方式更抽象、更迂回，也许反而更接近它的重要性。在《看》里那篇同题文章《为什么看动物？》中，伯格抓住人与其他物种连接的一个本质面向：“一个农民会喜欢他的猪，也会高兴地把它的肉腌起来。这句话里真正重要、也是城里来的陌生人最难理解的，是那两个分句之间用的是’而且’，不是’但是’。”

伯格有浪漫的一面，但他没有把土地上的生活感伤化，也没有画一幅怀旧的画，去美化那种由苦役、频繁的困顿、以及对自然和经济灾难格外脆弱所定义的存在。他问的问题——问他遇到的移民和流离失所的乡下人，问现代文明整体——是：当这种连续性被打断，当那种地方感、家园感、把动物当作陪伴、劳动和食物的感觉消失了，会发生什么？

答案回到他的批评。农民的生存依赖注意力：对天气；对习俗和传统；对一大堆实际的考量——那些考量同时也是审美和伦理的选择。你怎么种一块地？怎么做一把椅子？怎么养一个孩子？怎么哀悼死者？

回答这些问题的知识，是靠付出注意力获得的，而这种注意力，与一个画家面对风景、一个批评家面对一幅画时所带的，并没有质的不同。

这正是我们可能失去的东西。或者，用伯格的话说，正在被夺走的东西——尤其是被那些给我们无穷新意、似乎满足了我们从不知道自己有的欲望的技术。这种丧失，是记忆的取消，是”我们存在于历史之中”这一知识的取消。它并不抽象：定义现代政治那么多东西的愤怒——不管在发达国家还是全球南方，不管右翼还是左翼——都可以理解为一种反应：我们曾经有的什么东西没了。悲伤以怨恨的形式出现。

艺术——以及艺术批评——提示了一种脆弱的、有条件的替代。用伯格的话说：“我们生活在一个苦难的世界里，恶横行，这个世界的事件并不印证我们的存在，这个世界必须被抵抗。正是在这种处境里，审美的瞬间提供了希望。”