John Berger on change in a subsistence lifestyle
The British art critic John Berger spent the last 55 years of his life–from 1962 to 2017–living in rural France. During this time he wrote a fictional trilogy of short stories, collectively entitled Into Their Labors, about people who live a life of subsistence in the countryside, and their relationship to modernity and the city. In his introduction to the trilogy’s first volume, Pig Earth, this is what Berger had to say about the normalcy of upheaval for this way of life:
Each day a peasant experiences more change more closely than any other class. Some of these changes, like those of the seasons or like the process of ageing and failing energy, are foreseeable; many–like the weather from one day to the next, like a a cow choking to death on a potato, like lightning, like rains which come to early or too late, like fog that kills the blossom, like the continually evolving demands of those who extract the surplus, like an epidemic, like locusts–are unpredictable.
In fact the peasant’s experience of change is more intense than any list, however long and comprehensive, could ever suggest. For two reasons. First, his capacity for observation. Scarcely anything changes in a peasant’s entourage, from the clouds to the tail feathers of a cock, without his noticing and interpreting it in terms of the future. His active observation never ceases and and so he is continually recording and reflecting on changes. Secondly, his economic situation. This is usually such that even a slight change for the worst–a harvest which yields twenty-five percent less than the previous year, a fall in the market price of the harvest produce, an unexpected expense–can have disastrous or near-disastrous consequences. His observation does not allow the slightest sign of change to pass unnoticed, and his debt magnifies the real or imagined threat of a great part of what he observes. (xxi)
Sources
John Berger, Pig Earth. Vintage, [1979] 1992.