In Antwerp I did not even know what the impressionists were, now I have seen them and though not being one of the club yet I have much admired certain.
If I were living near you, I should try to make you understand that it might perhaps be more practical for you to paint with me than to write, and that you might be able to express your feelings more easily that way. In any case I can do something personally about your painting, but I am not in the writing profession.
The rest certainly must seem damn bad.” And the days when I bring home a study I say to myself – If it was like this every day, we might be able to get on; but the days when you come back empty-handed, and eat and sleep and spend money all the same, you don’t think much of yourself, and you feel like a fool and a shirker and a good-for-nothing.
You must not go there in too anemic or enervated a condition, if you set a value on coming out of it stronger. I do not consider it a great misfortune for you to be obliged to be a soldier, but rather as a very serious trial from which you will emerge – if you emerge at all – a very great artist.
I am not writing to Gauguin direct, but will send the letter to you, because in any case we had better sit tight. If we say nothing more, if the reply shows that we have made such and such a proposal but that there must be some initiative on his side too, then we can see if he is keen on it. If he is not keen on it, if it’s all the same to him, if he has something else in mind, let him remain independent and me too.
Love is the best and the noblest thing in the human heart, especially when it is tested by life as gold is tested by fire.
One night I went for a walk by the sea along the empty shore. It was not gay, but neither was it sad; it was- beautiful. The deep blue sky was flicked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. On the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, rose, brighter, flashing more like jewels than they do even in Paris. The sea was a very deep ultramarine.
But one doesn’t expect out of life what one has already learned that it cannot give, but rather one begins to see more and more clearly that life is only a kind of sowing time, and the harvest is not here.
One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.
What I am in the eyes of most people – a nonetity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person – somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.
What else can one do, when we think of all the things we do not know the reason for, than go look at a field of wheat? The history of those plants is like our own; for aren’t we, who live on bread, to a considerable extent like wheat, at least aren’t we forced to submit to growing like a plant without the power to move, by which I mean in what way our imagination impels us, and to being reaped when we are ripe, like the same wheat?
Whenever we meet disappointment and sickness and trouble, my boy, let us thank Him for having brought us this hour, and let us not forget meekness, for it is written: ‘On this man will I look, even on him who is poor and sorrowful and who trembleth at My word.
Sorrow is better than joy – and even in mirth the heart is sad – and it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasts, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. Our nature is sorrowful but for those who have learnt and are learning to look at Jesus Christ, there is always reason to rejoice.
For one’s own work, thoughts and observation are not enough, we need the comfort and blessing and guidance of a higher power, and that is something anyone who is at all serious and who longs to lift up his soul to the light is sure to recognize and experience. Pining for God works like leaven on dough.
Yet even then I do not think that my madness would take the form of persecution mania, since when in a state of excitement my feelings lead me rather to the contemplation of eternity, and eternal life. But all the same I must beware of my nerves, etc.
I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God’s help I shall succeed. I want – to be bound to Christ with unbreakable bonds and to feel these bonds. To be sorrowful yet always rejoicing. To live in and for Christ, to be one of the poor in His kingdom, steeped in the leaven, filled with His spirit, impelled by His Love, reposing in the Father with the repose of which I wrote to you in my last letter.
To do that well, one must have the Gospel in one’s heart; may He grant that. God says, Let there be light! And there is light. He speaks and it is there. He commands and there it stands and stands firm. He who calls us, is faithful, and shall accomplish it.
There was enough reason for it too, as the whole of France was shaken. Certainly in our eyes the election and its results and its representatives are only symbols. But what it proves once more is that worldly ambition and fame pass away, but the human heart beats the same to this day, in as perfect sympathy with the past of our buried forefathers as with the generation to come.
Today, Friday, I went there but could not see him. The intern and the attendant told me that after my wife left, he had had a terrible attack; he had a very bad night, and they had to put him in an isolated room. Since he has been locked in this room, he has eaten no food and utterly refused to talk. That is the exact state of your brother at present.
It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after. A work that is good may not last for ever, but the thought expressed by it will, and the work itself will surely survive for a very long time, and those who come later can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and copy their example.
If I succeed in putting some warmth and love into the work, then it will find friends.