Worth Noting Pages 66-71

WORTH NOTING PAGE 66

·         From The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.  Rosa’s thought upon hearing the point of Joe’s disappearance and return:

It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve.

·         From Lust For Life, Irving Stone: selected bits

·         [from Renan]  To act well in this world, one must die within oneself.  Man is not on this earth only to be happy, he is not there to be simply honest, he is there to realize greater things for humanity, to attain nobility and to surpass the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on.

·         [Mendes’ response to Vincent asking if Rembrandt died unhappy] “No,’ replied Mendes, he had expressed himself fully and he new the worth of what he had done.  He was the only one in his time who did.  What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint.  Whether he painted well or badly didn’t matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man.  The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist.  Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him.  Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam.  The fact that Rembrandt’s work brings joy to the whole world today is entirely gratuitous.  His life was complete and successful when he died, even though he was hounded to his grave.  The book of his life closed then, and it was beautifully wrought volume.  The quality of his perseverance and loyalty to his idea is what was important, not the quality of his work.”

·         It was bankruptcy once again, and time to take stock.  Only there was no stock.  There was no job, no money, no health, no strength, no ideas, no enthusiasms, no desires, no ambitions, no ideals, and worst of all, no pivot on which to hand his life.  He was twenty-six, five times a failure without the courage to begin anew.

·         With the passing of weeks he absorbed the life stories of hundreds of ordinary people like himself, who strove, succeeded a little, and failed a great deal; and through them he slowly got a proper perspective on himself.  The theme that ran through his brain: ‘I’m a failure’, ‘I’m a failure’, ‘I’m a failure’ gave way to ‘What shall I try now?  What am I best fitted for?  Where is my proper place in this world?’  In every book he read, he looked for that pursuit which might give his life direction again.

·         {Reverend Pieterson’s response to Vincent asking why he ‘hated to admit’ he like one of Vincent’s drawings]  ‘Because I ought not to like it.  The whole thing is wrong, dead wrong!  Any elementary class in art school would make your tear it up and begin again.  And yet something about her reaches out at me.  I could almost swear I have seen that woman somewhere before.’  ‘Perhaps you have seen her in the Borinage,’ said Vincent artlessly.  Pieterson looked at him quickly to see if he was being clever then said, ‘I think you’re right.  She has no face and she isn’t any one particular person.  Somehow she’s just all the miners’ wives in the Borinage put together.  That something you’ve caught is the spirit of the miner’s wife, Vincent, and that’s a thousand times more than any correct drawing.  Yes, I like your woman.  She says something to me directly.’

·         [Vincent’s explains his personal dilemma to Theo]  ‘You must not think that I disavow things.  I am faithful in my unfaithfulness, and my only anxiety is, how can I be of any use in the world?  Cannot I serve some purpose and to be of some good?’

 

WORTH NOTING PAGE 67

·         Lust For Life: selected bits con’d

·         [Vincent on denying, then realizing, his purpose]  ‘I wouldn’t let myself think about it.  I was afraid.  Of course there’s something I must do.  It’s the thing I’ve pointed to my whole life, and never suspected it.  I felt a tremendous urge to sketch, to put down what I saw on paper while I was studying in Amsterdam and Brussels.  But I wouldn’t allow myself to.  I was afraid it would interfere with my real work.  My real work!  How blind I was.  Something has been trying to push itself out of me all these years and I wouldn’t let it.  I beat it back.  Here I am, twenty-seven, with nothing accomplished.  What an utterly blind and stupid idiot I’ve been.’

·         [Vincent asks Weissenbruch, ‘Why are you so interested in seeing me suffer?’]  ‘Because it will make a real artist out of you.  The more you suffer, the more grateful you ought to be.  That’s the stuff out of which first rate painters are made.  An empty stomach is better than a full one.  And a broken heart is better than happiness.  Never forget that.  The man who has never been miserable has nothing to paint about.  Happiness is bovine; it’s only good for cows and tradesmen.  Artists thrive on pain; if your hungry, discouraged and wretched, be grateful!   God is being good to you!  If poverty destroys you, then you’re a weakling and ought to go down.  If hunger and pain can kill a man, then he’s not worth saving.  The only artists who belong on this earth are the men whom neither God nor the devil can kill until they’ve said everything they want to say.’

·         {Van Gogh’s pallette]  As soon as his allowance arrived from Theo, he would rush down to the dealer and buy large tubes of ochre, colbalt and Prussian blue, and smaller tubes of Naples Yellow, terra sienna and ultramarine.

·         One starts with a hopeless struggle to follow nature, and everything goes wrong; one ends by calmly creating from one’s palette, and nature agrees with it and follows.

·         [Manet]  There are no amateurs but those who make bad pictures.

·         [Zola]  The public cannot understand that there is no room for moral judgements in art.    Art is amoral; so is life.

·         [Mauve]  A man can either paint, or talk about painting, but he can’t do both at the same time.

·         The desire to succeed had left Vincent.  He worked because he had to, because it kept him from suffering too much mentally, because it distracted his mind.  He could do without a wife, a home, and children; he could do without love and friendship and health; he could do without security, comfort, and food; he could even do without God.  But he could not do without something which was greater than himself, which was his life – the power and ability to create.

·         Vincent came to the conclusion that the more finely a color was pounded, the more it became saturated with oil.  Oil was only the carrying medium for color; he didn’t much care for it, particularly since he did not object to his canvases having a rough look.  Instead of buying color that had been pounded on stone for God knows how many hours in Paris, he decided to become his own color man.  Theo asked Pere Tanguy to send
Vincent the three chromes, the malachite, the vermilion, the orange lead, the colbalt, and the ultramarine.

·         Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what he had seen before his eyes, he used color arbitrarily to express himself with greater force.  He realized that what Pissarro had told him in Paris was true.  ‘You must boldly exaggerate the effects, either in harmony or discord, which colors produce.’

·         [Maupassant]  ‘The artist has the liberty to exaggerate, to create in his novel a world more beautiful, more simple, more consoling than ours.’

 

WORTH NOTING PAGE 68

·         Lust For Life: selected bits con’d

·         [Vincent]  I feel more and more that we must not judge God by this world.  It’s just a study that didn’t come off.  What can you do in a study that has gone wrong, if you are fond of the artist?  You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue.  But you have the right to ask for something better.  We should see some other works by the same hand before we judge him.  This world was evidently botched up in a hurry on one of his bad days, when the artist did not have his wits about him

·         [Doctor Rey]  You are grand nerveux, Vincent.  You never have been normal.  But then, no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist.  Normal men don’t create works of art.  They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die.  You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us.  But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your own destruction.  The strain of it breaks every artist in time.

·         [Dryden]  There is pleasure, sure, in being mad, which none but madmen know.

·         At the bottom, a painter is a man too much absorbed by what his eyes see, and is not sufficiently master of the rest of his life.  But does that make him unfit to live in this world?

·         “If Delacroix can discover painting when he no longer has teeth or breath, I can discover it when I no longer have teeth or wits.”

·         The Red Vinyard was first and only of Vincent’s work to sell in his lifetime.  Bought for four hundred francs by Anna Bock, sister of the Dutch painter.

·         Mercure de France – Les Isolees.  That which characterizes all the work of Vincent Van Gogh is the excess of force, and the violence in expression.  In his categorical affirmative of the essential character of things, in his often rash simplification of form, in his insolent desire to look at the sun face to face, in the passion of his drawing and color, there lies revealed a powerful one, a male, a darer who is sometimes brutal, sometimes ingenuously delicate.  Vincent Van Gogh is of the sublime line of Frans Hals.  His realism goes beyond the truth of those great little burgers of Holland, so healthy in body so well-balanced in mind, who were his ancestors.  What marks his canvases is his conscientious study of character, his continuous search for the quintessence of each object, his deep and almost childlike love of nature and truth.  This robust and true artist with an illuminated soul, will he ever know the joys of being rehabilitated by the public?  I do not think so.  He is too simple, and at the same time too subtle, for our contemporary bourgeois spirit.  He will never be altogether understood except by his brother artists.

G.-Albert Aurier.

·         Vincent, looking down at the child once more, felt the awful pang of barren men whose flesh leaves no flesh behind, whose death is death eternal.

·         ]Doctor Gachet on Vincent]  “Of course he’s crazy.  But what would you?  All artists are crazy.  That’s the best thing about them.  I love them that way.  I sometimes wish I could be crazy myself!  ‘No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness!’  Do you know who said that?  Aristotle, that’s who.”

·         [Vincent to Doctor Gachet]  “Why are you unhappy, Doctor Gachet?  He asked.  “Ah, Vincent, I have labored so many years … and I have done so little good.  The doctor sees nothing but pain, pain, pain.”  “I would gladly exchange my calling for yours”, said Vincent.  A rapt eagerness lighted up the melancholy in Gachet’s eyes.  “Ah, no, Vincent, it is the most beautiful thing in the world, to be a painter.  All my life I wanted to be an artist … but I could spare only an hour here and there … there are so many sick people who need me.” 

 

WORTH NOTING PAGE 69

·         Lust For Life: selected bits con’d

Doctor Gachet went on his knees and pulled a pile of canvases from under Vincent’s bed.  He held a glowing yellow sunflower before him.  “If I painted just one canvas like this, Vincent, I would consider my life justified.  I spent the years curing people’s pain … but they died in the end, anyway … so what did it matter?  These sunflowers of yours … they will cure the pain in people’s hearts … they will bring people joy … for centuries … that is why your life is successful … that is why you should be a happy man.”

·         [Vincent facing death]  This time it was the end.  He had known that in Arles, the very first time, but he had been unable to make the clean break.  He wanted to say good-bye.  In spite of it all, it had been a good world that he lived in.  As Gauguin said, ‘Besides the poison, there is the antidote.’  And now, leaving the world, he wanted to say good-bye to it, say good-bye to all those friends who had helped mould his life; to Ursula, whose contempt had wrenched him out of a conventional life and made him an outcast; to Mendes da Costa, who had made him believe that ultimately he would express himself, and that expression would justify life; to Kay Vos, whose ‘No, never! never!’ had been written in acid on his soul; to Madame Denis, Jacques Verney and Henri Decrucq, who had helped him love the despised ones of the earth; to the Reverend Pietersen, whose kindness had transcended Vincent’s ugly clothes and boorish manners; to his mother and father, who had loved him as best they could; to Christine, the only wife with which fate had seen fit to place him; to Mauve, who had been his master for a few sweet weeks; to Weissenbruch and De Bock, his first painter friends; to his Uncles Vincent, Jan Cornelius Marinus, and Stricker, who had labeled him the black sheep of the Van Goigh family; to Margot, the only woman who had ever loved him, and who tried to kill herself for that love; to all his painter friends in Paris; Lautrec, who had been shut up in an asylum again, to die; Seurat, dead at thirty-one from overwork; Paul Gauguin, a mendicant in Brittany; Rousseau, rotting in his hole near the Bastille; Cezanne, a bitter recluse on a hilltop in Aix; to Pere Tanguy and Roulin, who had shown him the salt in the simple souls of the earth; to Rachel and Doctor Rey, who had been kind to him with the kindness he needed; to Aurier and Doctor Gachet, the only two men in the world who had thought him a great painter; and last of all, to his brother Theo, long suffering, long loving, best and dearest of all possible brothers.  But words had never been his medium.  He would have to paint good-bye.  One cannot paint good-bye.  He turned his face upward to the sun.  He pressed the revolver into his side.  He pulled the trigger.  He sank down, burying his face in the rich, pungent loam of the field, a more resilient earth returning to the womb of its mother.

·         On Worry:   … do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.                   Matthew 6:34

·         On Love, lyric from Moulin Rouge

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn … is just to love, and accept love in return.

·         On the Coming of the Last Judgement from the Holy Gospel

You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars.  Nations will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.  There will be famine and pestilence and earthquake.  All these are but the beginning of sorrow.  Others will gather you up to kill you.  You shall be hated by all nations for my name’s sake.  Iniquity will abound.  The love of gold will afflict many.  But those who endure to the end will be saved.  And you shall preach this gospel of the Kingdom to all nations.

 

WORTH NOTING PAGE 70

·         Definition of Experience by Italo Calvino:

Memory, plus the wound it has left in you, plus the change it has worked in you that has made you different.

·         The American Public, as defined by Ted Zalinsky, Auto Parts King in Tommy Boy

What the American public doesn’t know … is what makes them the American public. 

·         The Intellectual, as defined by Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest

Brains without a purpose, noise without a sound, shape without substance.

·         On Humor, from Will Rogers

Everything is funny as long as it’s happening to someone else.

·         Living A Notable Life, from George Washington Carver

When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the        attention of the world.

·         On babies from Carl Sandberg

A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on. 

·         Formula for Winning from James Patterson’s Cat and Mouse:

Victory belongs to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.

·         A maxim frequently used at Quantico (also from Cat & Mouse):

All truths are half truths and possibly not even that.

·         Einstein’s incisive definition of insanity: 

Endlessly repeating the same process, hoping for a different result.

·         On color and form from Cezanne:

When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.

·         On laws from Joseph Campbell:

The god within us is the one that gives the laws and can change the laws. 

And God is within us.