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Cuesmes, Belgium
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >>, July 1880
My Dear Theo,
I am writing to you rather reluctantly because, for a good many reasons, I have kept silent for such a long time. To some extent you have become a stranger to me, and I to you perhaps more than you think. It is probably better for us not to go on like that. It is probable that I would not have written to you even now, were it not that I feel obliged, compelled, to do so – because, be it noted, you yourself have compelled me to.
I heard in Etten that you had sent 50 francs for me. Well, I have accepted them. With reluctance, of course, with a feeling of some despondency, of course, but I have reached a sort of impasse, am in trouble, what else can I do? And so I am writing to thank you.
As you may know, I am back in the Borinage
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >>. Father
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> said he would prefer me to stay somewhere near Etten, but I refused and I believe I was right to do so. To the family, I have, willy-nilly, become a more or less objectionable and shady sort of character, at any rate a bad lot. How then could I then be of any use to anyone? And so I am inclined to think the best and most sensible solution all round would be for me to go away and to keep my distance, to cease to be, as it were. What the moulting season is for birds – the time when they lose their feathers – setbacks, misfortune and hard times are for us human beings. You can cling on to the moulting season, you can also emerge from it reborn, but it must not be done in public.
The thing is far from amusing, not very exhilarating, and so one should take care to keep out of the way. Well, so be it.
Now, though it is a fairly hopeless task to regain the trust of an entire family, one which has perhaps never been wholly weaned from prejudice and other equally honourable and respectable qualities, I am not entirely without hope that, bit by bit, slowly but surely, the good relationship between one and all may be restored. In the first place I should be glad to see this good relationship – to put it no more strongly than that – restored at least between Father
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> and me, and further, I set great store by seeing it restored between the two of us. A good relationship is infinitely preferable to a misunderstanding.
Now I must trouble you with certain abstract matters, hoping that you will listen to them patiently. I am a man of passions, capable of and given to doing more or less outrageous things for which I sometimes feel a little sorry. Every so often I say or do something too hastily, when it would have been better to have shown a little more patience. Other people also act rashly at times, I think.
This being the case, what can be done about it? Should I consider myself a dangerous person, unfit for anything? I think not. Rather, every means should be tried to put these very passions to good effect.
To mention just one by way of an example, I have a more or less irresistible passion for books and the constant need to eat bread. You will understand that. When I lived in other surroundings, surroundings full of pictures and works of art, I conceived a violent, almost fanatical passion for those surroundings, as you know. And I do not regret that, and even now, far from home, I often feel homesick for the land of pictures
You may remember that I knew very well (and it may be that I know it still) what Rembrandt was or what Millet
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> was or Jules Dupre
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> or Delacroix or Millais
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> or Matthijs Maris
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >>.
Well, today I am no longer in those surroundings, yet they say that what is known as the soul never dies but lives on for ever, continuing to seek for ever and again.
So instead of succumbing to my homesickness I told myself: your land, your fatherland, is all around. So instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >>, in so far as I was capable of activity, in other words I chose the kind of melancholy
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> that despairs numbly and in distress. I accordingly made a more or less serious study of the books within my reach, such as the Bible and Michelet
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >>’s La revolution Francaise, and then last winter Shakespeare and a little Victor Hugo and Dickens and Beecher Stowe and recently ?schylus and then various less classical writers, a few great minor masters. You know, don’t you, that Fabritius and Bida are counted among the minor masters?
Now anyone who becomes absorbed in all this is sometimes considered outrageous, ‘shocking,’ sinning more or less unwillingly against certain forms and customs and proprieties. It is a pity that people take that amiss. You know, for example, that I have often neglected my appearance. I admit it, and I also admit that it is ‘shocking.’
But look here, lack of money and poverty have something to do with it too, as well as a profound disillusionment, and besides, it is sometimes a good way of ensuring the solitude you need, of concentrating more or less on whatever study you are immersed in. One essential study is that of medicine. There is scarcely anybody who does not try to acquire some knowledge of it, who does not at least try to grasp what it is about (and you see, I still know absolutely nothing about it). And all these things absorb you, preoccupy you, set you dreaming, musing and thinking.
Now for the past five years or so, I don’t know how long exactly, I have been more or less without permanent employment, wandering from pillar to post. You will say, ever since such and such a time you have been going downhill, you have been feeble, you have done nothing. Is that entirely true?
What is true is that I have at times earned my own crust of bread, and at other times a friend has given it to me out of the goodness of his heart. I have lived whatever way I could, for better or for worse, taking things just as they came. It is true that I have forfeited the trust of various people, it is true that my financial affairs are in a sorry state, it is true that the future looks rather bleak, it is true that I might have done better, it is true that I have wasted time when it comes to earning a living, it is true that my studies are in a fairly lamentable and appalling state, and that my needs are greater, infinitely greater than my resources. But does that mean going downhill and doing nothing?
You might say, but why didn’t you go through with university, continue as they wanted you to? To that I can only reply that it was too expensive, and besides, the future then looked no better than it does now, along the path I am now taking.
And I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it – keep going, keep going come what may.
But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the origional vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.
You should know that it is the same with evangelists as it is with artists. There is an old academic school, often odious and tyrannical, the ‘abomination of desolation’, in short, men who dress, as it were, in a suit of steel armour, a cuirass, of prejudice and convention. When they are in charge, it is they who hand out the jobs and try, with much red tape, to keep them for their proteges and to exclude the man with an open mind.
Their God is like the God of Shakespeare’s drunken Falstaff, “the inside of a church.” Indeed, by a strange coincidence, some evangelical (???) gentlemen have the same view of matters spiritual as that drunkard (which might surprise them somewhat were they capable of human emotion). But there is little fear that their blindness will ever turn into insight.
This is a bad state of affairs for anyone who differs from them and protests with heart and soul and all the indignation he can muster. For my part, I hold those academicians who are not like these academicians in high esteem, but the decent ones are thinner on the ground than you might think.
Now, one of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do. It is not just a question of my appearance, which is what they have sanctimoniously reproached me with. It goes deeper, I do assure you.
I am telling you all this not to complain, not to make excuses for matters in which I may perhaps have been somewhat at fault
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >>, but simply to tell you the following: during your final visit last summer when we were walking together near that abandoned mineshaft which they call “La Sorciere,” you reminded me of another walk we once took at another time near the old canal and the mill
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> at Rijswijk
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >>, and, you said, we used to agree about many things, but, you added, “You have changed since then, you are no longer the same.” Well, that is not entirely true. What has changed is that my life then was less difficult and my future seemingly less gloomy, but as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of thinking is concerned, that has not changed. But if there has indeed been a change, then it is that I think, believe and love more seriously now what I thought, believed and loved even then.
So you would be mistaken should you continue to think that I have become less keen on, say, Rembrandt, Millet
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >>, or Delacroix or whoever or whatever, for the reverse is the case, but there are many different things worth believing and loving, you see – there is something of Rembrandt in Shakespeare, something of Correggio or of Sarto in Michelet
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> and something of Delacroix in Victor Hugo, and there is also something of Rembrandt in the Gospel or, if you prefer, something of the Gospel in Rembrandt, it comes to much the same thing, provided you understand it properly, do not try to distort it and bear in mind that the elements of the comparisons are not intended to detract in any way from the merits of the original individuals.
And in Bunyan there is something of M. Maris
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >> or of Millet
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Vincent van Gogh letters dictionary >>, a reality that, in a manner of speaking, is more real than reality itself, something hitherto unknown that, if only you can read it, will tell you untold things. And in Beecher Stowe there is something of Ary Scheffer.
Now, if you can forgive someone for immersing himself in pictures, perhaps you will also grant that the love of books is as sacred as that of Rembrandt, indeed, I believe that the two complement each other.
I very much admire the portrait of a man by Fabritius that we stood looking at for a long time in the gallery in Haarlem one day when we took another walk together. Admittedly, I am as fond of Dickens’s ‘Richard Cartone’ [Sydney Carton] in his Paris & Londres in 1793 [A Tale of Two Cities], and I could point to other particularly gripping characters in other books with a more or less striking resemblance. And I think that Kent, a character in Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” is as noble and distinguished a man as that figure by Th. de Keyser, though Kent and King Lear are reputed to have lived much earlier.
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