Excerpt: Dear Theo: the Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh by Irving Stone
by Irving Stone
My
dear little sister,
Is the Bible enough for us? Nowadays I believe Jesus
himself would again say to those who just sit melancholy, it is not here, it is risen. Why seek ye the
living among the dead?
If the spoken or written word is to remain the light of
the world, it’s our right and our duty to acknowledge that we live in an age in
which it’s written in such a way, spoken in such a way that in order to find
something as great and as good and as original, and just as capable of
overturning the whole old society as in the past, we can safely compare it with
the old upheaval by the Christians.
For my part, I’m always glad that I’ve read the Bible
better than many people nowadays, just because it gives me a certain peace that
there have been such lofty ideas in the past. But precisely because
I think the old is good, I find the new all the more so. All the more so
because we can take action ourselves in our own age, and both the past and the
future affect us only indirectly.
My own fortunes dictate above all that I’m making rapid
progress in growing up into a little old man, you know, with wrinkles, with a
bristly beard, with a number of false teeth &c.
But what does that matter? I have a dirty and difficult
occupation, painting, and if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint, but being as I
am I often work with pleasure, and I see the possibility glimmering through of
making paintings in which there’s some youth and freshness, although my own
youth is one of those things I’ve lost. If I didn’t have Theo it wouldn’t be
possible for me to do justice to my work, but because I have him as a friend I
believe that I’ll make more progress and that things will run their course.
It’s my plan to go to the south for a while, as soon as I can, where there’s
even more colour and even more sun.
But what I hope to achieve is to paint a good portrait.
Anyway.
Now to get back to your little piece, I feel uneasy
about assuming for my own use or recommending to others for theirs the belief
that powers above us intervene personally to help us or to comfort us. Providence
Well, in your piece there’s always a certain
sentimentality and in its form, above all, it’s reminiscent of the stories
about providence already referred to above, let’s say the providence in
question, stories that so repeatedly failed to hold water and against which so
very much could be said.
And above all I find it a very worrying matter that you
believe you have to study in order to write. No, my dear little sister, learn
to dance or fall in love with one or more notary’s clerks, officers, in short
whoever’s within your reach; rather, much rather commit any number of follies
than study in Holland, it serves absolutely no purpose other than to make
someone dull, and so I won’t hear of it.
For my part, I still continually have the most
impossible and highly unsuitable love affairs from which, as a rule, I emerge
only with shame and disgrace.
And in this I’m absolutely right, in my own view,
because I tell myself that in earlier years, when I should have been in love, I
immersed myself in religious and socialist affairs and considered art more
sacred, more than now. Why are religion or law or art so sacred? People who do
nothing other than be in love are perhaps more serious and holier than those
who sacrifice their love and their heart to an idea. Be this as it may, to
write a book, to perform a deed, to make a painting with life in it, one must
be a living person oneself. And so for you, unless you never want to progress,
studying is very much a side issue. Enjoy yourself as much as you can and have
as many distractions as you can, and be aware that what people want in art
nowadays has to be very lively, with strong colour, very intense. So intensify
your own health and strength and life a little, that’s the best study.
