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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