Oh, I am going to get made fun of for this.
My IRL friends know that I've been threatening to do this for a while, but I wanted to finish reading Vincent Van Gogh's letters to Theo before sitting down to do an appreciation post.
It's sort of a joke among my friends that I am in love with Vincent Van Gogh. But, for goodness' sake, just look at the man. Those eyes! The self portrait above is from spring 1887, and it has been my favorite of his since I saw it hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago when I was visiting the city for post-grad auditions. I had been having a particularly rough time of it--trying to keep up with classes while simultaneously preparing for a recital and steeling myself for the possibility of rejection from any or all of the programs to which I was applying was beginning to wear me down. So, of course, I decided to walk up Michigan Avenue and look at some art.
The story of Van Gogh's life has always been particularly poignant for me because, like him, I know how it feels to hate your art, to work yourself half to death in the pursuit of perfection and never get there, to feel misunderstood and unappreciated and lost. I feel emotions very intensely, which I'm sure is common among creative types, and this can result in some severe mood swings (although I have never gone so far as to cut off a part of my ear in one of my more manic moods--that sort of stunt can be pulled only once, and he got to it first).
So, while working one day at the Art Library, I took it upon myself to check out a collection of translations of the letters which Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo between 1873 and his death in 1890. And, more than anything, I was struck by how optimistic he seemed to be. While acknowledging that the world was often disappointing and sad, he seems to have--at least until Christmas 1888, when he performed the act that everyone seems to remember him by--an amazing amount of positivity and resilience.
I finished reading his letters on Thursday, sitting in the main lobby of the School of Music. And then I cried, frustrated that things could have gone so wrong for someone so talented and initially positive that he felt he had no other way out. I have dog-eared some excerpts, because I want someone else to know that Vincent Van Gogh was more than just a madman who hacked off part of his ear and then shot himself--some of these letters, I feel I could have written myself, and, although his story is sad, it's nice to know that, no matter how alone life sometimes feels, someone else has felt the same way.
Dated April 3, 1878
And I believe that we also agreed on this point, that one must especially have the end in mind, and that the victory one would gain after a whole life of work and effort is better than one that is gained sooner. Whoever lives sincerely and encounters much trouble and disappointment, but is not bowed down by them, is worth more than the one who has always sailed before the wind and has only known relative prosperity. For who are those that show some sign of higher life? They are those to whom may be applied the words: "Laboureurs, votre vie est triste, laboureurs, vous souffrez dans la vie, laboureurs, vous êtes bien-heureux." (Labourers, your life is sad, labourers, you suffer in this life, labourers, you are blessed!)
The second half of July, 1882
I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is, notwithstanding everything, founded less on anger than on love, founded more on serenity than on passion. It is true that I am often in the greatest misery, but still there is within me a calm pure harmony and music.
Dated February 8, 1883
Sometimes I cannot believe that I am only thirty years old, I feel so much older. I feel older only when I think that most people who know me consider me a failure, and how it really might be so, if some things do not change for the better; and when I think it might be so, I feel it so vividly that it quite depresses me and makes me as downhearted as if it were really so. In a calmer and more normal mood I am sometimes glad that thirty years have passed, and not without teaching me something for the future, and I feel strength and energy for the next thirty years, if I should live that long. And in my imagination I see years of serious work before me, and happier ones than the first thirty.
Mid-March, 1883
You write in your letter sometimes which I sometimes feel also: "Sometimes I do not know how I shall pull through." Look here, I often feel the same in more than one respect, not only in financial things, but in art itself, and in life in general. But do you think that something exceptional? Don't you think ever man with a little pluck and energy has those moments? Moments of melancholy, of distress, of anguish, I think we all have them, more or less, and it is a condition of every conscious human life . . . And sometimes there comes relief, sometimes there comes new inner energy and one rises up from it, till at last, some day, one perhaps doesn't rise up any more . . . but that is nothing extraordinary, and I repeat, such is the common human fate, in my opinion.
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