Time & Perspective Quote by John Berger

Memory isn’t a scrapbook here; it’s an organ. Berger’s image is grotesquely precise: the past “grows” the way living tissue grows, slow and involuntary, until it wraps you in something meant to sustain life but repurposed as a shroud. A placenta is intimate, protective, and temporary. By yoking it to “dying,” Berger flips the nurture script into something suffocating, suggesting that what once fed us - origins, formative stories, inherited identities - can become a dependency that keeps us from moving, changing, or even noticing we’re being enclosed.

The line works because it refuses nostalgia’s soft-focus. It’s not that the past is heavy; it’s biological. You don’t simply remember; you are incubated by what you’ve already lived. There’s an implied accusation, too: the culture that romanticizes history, tradition, and “roots” may be fetishizing an amniotic comfort that’s indistinguishable from decline. The past isn’t a teacher in this sentence. It’s a life-support system with an expiration date.

Context matters: Berger spent his career interrogating how we see - art, labor, politics, the ways power frames reality. This metaphor is a piece of that project. It warns that experience can become a closed circuit, a private womb of meaning that insulates you from the present’s demands. The subtext is existential but also political: when the past becomes the only habitat you recognize, you stop imagining futures, and someone else gets to write them for you.