Goat Earth

Re-reading John Berger's Pig Earth after 30 years or so, I wonder now how I thought, when I first read it, that the book over-romanticized peasant life. Perhaps I was too citified back then to let myself be charmed by something so elemental as mere survival.

I do love the great cities with their own peculiar logic and madness, but the time I’ve spent in the Anatolian countryside has enabled me to see that you cannot have one without the other. Istanbul’s magnificence is due, in part, to its proximity to Anatolia's “goat earth.”