“For an animal its natural environment and habitat are a given; for man—despite the faith of the empiricists—reality is not a given: it has to be continually sought out, held—I am tempted to say salvaged. One is taught to oppose the real to the imaginary, as though the first were always at hand and the second distant, far away. This opposition is false. Events are always to hand. But the coherence of these events—which is what one means by reality—is an imaginative construction. Reality always lies beyond—and this is as true for materialists as for idealists. For Plato, for Marx. Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clichés.”
— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
