Creativity Quote by John Berger

A whole political horror is smuggled into the calm grammar of “the century.” Berger isn’t describing travel as adventure or choice; he’s naming motion as coercion, a modern condition where borders, wars, markets, and paperwork shove bodies around like debris. “Enforced travel” is a cold euphemism that echoes the language of bureaucracy - deportation orders, evacuation notices, “relocation” programs - while “disappearances” sharpens it into something more intimate and terrifying: not just leaving, but being unmade in the eyes of those left behind.

The line’s power comes from its camera angle. Berger doesn’t center the heroic exile or the survivor narrative. He focuses on the witness: “people helplessly seeing others… disappear over the horizon.” That horizon matters. It’s not the clean finality of a death; it’s a vanishing point, a slow erasure where distance becomes a weapon. You can still picture them, but you can’t reach them. It’s separation engineered by systems too large to argue with.

Contextually, Berger is a 20th-century artist-intellectual steeped in Europe’s displacements: two world wars, partition, the Holocaust and its aftershocks, decolonization, the Cold War’s prisons and secret police, and later the economic migrations that rebrand necessity as “mobility.” The subtext is accusatory but disciplined: modernity congratulates itself on movement, yet produces a century where movement is often what happens when someone else holds the map.