Nature & Animals Quote by John Berger

Materialism, Berger suggests, is a kind of training collar: useful for keeping your thinking from bolting into mysticism, but never fully successful at stopping the mind from running. The line’s force comes from how it refuses to treat imagination as a lofty, disembodied faculty. Instead, it’s animal, restless, physical. A dog asleep in a basket is domesticated, contained, fed; yet in its sleep it still twitches toward prey. That image smuggles in Berger’s central suspicion about strict materialist philosophies: they can describe the world’s structures, but they can’t extinguish desire, projection, or the hunger for meanings that aren’t immediately “useful.”

The subtext is not anti-materialist so much as anti-puritanical. Berger, a Marxist-inflected critic and artist, spent his career defending attention to the real conditions of life while also insisting that looking is never neutral. The imagination “dreams” even when theory tells it not to. That’s not a failure of discipline; it’s evidence that human consciousness is built to reach past the given. The hare matters because it’s not a metaphysical abstraction but a concrete, worldly object: swift, distant, hard to catch. Imagination doesn’t dream of heaven; it dreams of something that could be pursued.

Contextually, this lands in the late-20th-century tension between political critique and private longing: how to stay faithful to material analysis without becoming emotionally impoverished. Berger’s sentence works because it grants the mind its contraband. Even in the basket, we practice escape.