Passage

For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.  Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?  Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.  One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is that we cannot get to a star while we are alive, any more than we can take the train when we are dead.  So to me it seems possible that cholera, gravel, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.  To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

-Vincent van Gogh  

(in a letter to Theo, Summer 1888, Arles)

I had a conversation with a close friend about two months ago.  We spoke of people living and dead; we spoke of life.  I asked her, albeit rhetorically, how it was possible that I could feel so utterly connected to a man who has been dead for well over a century.  This passage from a letter to his brother offers an answer: he and I share a relationship of thoughts, ideas, feelings, and convictions.  Evident in his work, he saw the world differently than those around him--a vision that blessed and cursed his existence.  He painted to offer something, something, to his fellow people and, I am guessing, possibly to rid the demons within him.  I understand this.  And while he and I live a century apart, we shall see each other one day when taking a train is no longer a locomotive option for me.