The Hammock Papers: Happy Birthday, van Gogh

30 March 2024

Happy Birthday, van Gogh

van Gogh, Landscape from Saint-Rémy, 1889

When you say in your last letter "what a riddle there is in nature," I echo your words. Life in the abstract is already a riddle, reality turns it into a riddle within a riddle.

And who are we to solve it? All the same, we ourselves form a particle of it, of the society of which we ask, Where is it going, to the devil or to God?

Yet the sun rises, says V. Hugo.

Long, long ago, in L’ami Fritz by Erckmann-Chatrian, I read a remark by the old rabbi that has often come to mind since: "We are not alive in order to be happy, but we must try to deserve happiness." Taken in isolation, this thought seems a little pedantic, at least one could interpret it as a little pedantic, but in the context in which the remark occurred, namely on the lips of the sympathetic figure of old Rabbi David Sechel, it struck me deeply and I often think of it. Also when drawing – one shouldn’t count on selling one’s drawings, but one has a duty to make them such that they have value and are serious. For one may not become nonchalant or indifferent, even if one is disappointed by one’s circumstances.

Vincent van Gogh, born on this day in 1853, from a letter to his brother, Theo, Sunday, 10 December 1882

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL