Too Many Goodbyes

I’ve been reading John Berger a lot lately. His thoughts speak to a quality of human nature that always finds its way into my writings, so I can’t read a John Berger essay without having a few thoughts of my own. They’ll find their way into a story at some point, but let me share them with you now in a raw form.

Every artistic form has a unique interplay with reality. We readers move into our novels, inhabit them, John Berger writes in “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” whereas paintings bring their images to us, into the here and now.

Theater is communal, a ritual of returning. By contrast, cinema is about moving as individuals away from where we are to an unknown destination. That’s why film became the essential narrative art form of the 20th century. It was a century of displacement and goodbyes, when world wars and civil wars and ethnic conflicts and famines led to entire populations being forced to move—sometimes to escape the horror and sometimes as part of it, at the point of a gun—with the result being, as Berger reminds us, a “century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.”

Berger has tricked us with his title. I read it, as I’m sure most people do, as a conditional statement, as in “every time we say goodbye, we hope to meet again soon.” What he winds us making us think about is not the conditions of our goodbye, but their inevitability—“I want you to stay with me forever, but every time we say goodbye.” That’s the condition we’ve come to accept as normal in our time—every time we feel drawn to someone or something, we say goodbye.

The movies take us away from that plight, give us an escape from the perpetual goodbyes that became our way of life in the 20th century and has continued to haunt us into this century. “In the sky of the cinema, people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives,” Berger writes. “Its essential subject—in our century of disappearances—is the soul to which it offers a global village.”

We are indeed a global village. We live in desperate times—70,000 deaths already from coronavirus, soon to be 100,000; 130,000 predicted by some. Goodbyes have gotten too frequent and have taken on the same ephemeral suddenness that millions of our global ancestors lived through in the last century. Our global village needs a soul now as badly as it did then. Where does it look to find such a soul?

Berger says the power that movies have is that they occupy us completely while we’re in the theater, and so we see the story of humanity in ways we don’t see it in our normal lives. It’s what Viktor Shklovsky called “defamiliarization.” In a movie, Berger writes, “the most familiar sights—a child sleeping, a man climbing a staircase—become mysterious.” Simple actions there have so many meanings and things just happen, no explanation. Along the way, we rediscover our world, and once we do, we come back to that world “with the love and caring of ghosts who left it.”

It “reminds us of a longing, a prayer.”

Cinema can still do that, and I’m all in for a good movie right now. But as Berger points out, most films don’t accomplish this universality. Only the ones that attain a certain artistry do it, and when a filmmaker tries to do it, it just becomes pretentious. But when it happens, it becomes “a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.”

We do need a reminder today of what it means to be human and what we share together and what we face together. Berger calls that “a human prayer. Simultaneously a plea and an attempt to redeem.”

Obviously, we can’t get to a theater today. We’re left on our own at a place where Berger suggests it doesn’t happen like it does in a theater—our real world.

It’s time to adapt.

Every artistic form has a unique interplay with reality. We readers move into our novels, inhabit them, whereas paintings bring their images to us, into the here and now. Theater is communal, a ritual of returning, and lots of theaters are streaming videos of previous shows, inviting us to return. So slip away from the news and the fear for a while and find an art form that will become your own human prayer, both a plea (and we’ve all got one right now) and an attempt to redeem (which right now, we all need…we all desperately need).