It turns out that this weekend I’m hosting a couple of couch surfers, friends of a new friend, all the way from Florence. Amal, who is a traveller and student of language philosophy, plus Giuseppe, a painter, are a wonderful duo and very pleasant guests.

They had been to Rembrandt’s old house on Friday, and today they were going to the Rijksmuseum. Giuseppe especially wanted to see a certain painting by Rembrandt. I went to the Van Gogh Museum, since I had been reading his letters to Theo and preparing to write this.

Both museums are on the Museumplein. We walked there, and before we went our separate ways, Giuseppe told me that once when van Gogh visited the Rijksmuseum—right before he committed himself to the asylum—he refused to leave at closing time, consumed with intense study of a Rembrandt, and bit the staff who dragged him out. Amal promised to try to avoid this situation.

Giuseppe’s English is a little rusty, and my Italian is nonexistent, so Amal is acting as a translator, which is fun. Her translating, a kind of bilingual echo, is an acknowledgement that what I say makes enough sense to cross the language barrier. Our voices filter through her and become softer. Our sentences are reshaped and distilled, as if via a kind of human telegraph—one who often seems amused at our communiqués.

The three of us went out last night to drink some whisky—Amal’s choice—and talk. I noticed right away that Giuseppe’s painterly gaze was studying the surroundings and the locals. A tall Dutch woman was dancing and smoking in a retro black & white outfit. He estimated her shoe size, probably a 46. There was also a dancing man with a bandaged leg, another picturesque figure.

I mentioned I had been reading the letters. Soon after, they asked “So why do you love Vincent van Gogh?” This seemed like a loaded question. Maybe they mistook me for a more devoted disciple than I really was. In any case, I remembered Vincent’s advice to Theo:

“It is good to love as many things as one can, for therein lies true strength, and those who love much, do much and accomplish much, and whatever is done with love is done well.”

I quickly reasoned that it would in fact make sense for me to love Vincent van Gogh, and answered with a somewhat improvised reason, though it was quite true. It starts with a guy named Frank Morton.

An older friend of my brother, Frank is a bluesman from Sandviken, my hometown. He sings of the local working class, the underdogs, the outsiders. He also dabbles in oil painting, doing remakes of Iron Maiden album art, which is apparently quite lucrative. Years ago he wrote a song called “Sång till Vincent,” a reworking of Dylan’s “Song for Woody.” It’s an homage to van Gogh and everyone else who “walked the hard road.” Frank told us about Vincent’s letters, and it became evident that the painter was a real hero to him.

Frank is also something of a conversationalist, a barfly, and a character. He reminds me of Joseph Roulin, the Arles postman from van Gogh’s portrait:

“The man is a well-known republican and socialist, argues quite well and knows a great deal.”

I remember a conversation between me, Frank, and Daniel, my brother. It was a summer night and we were playing pool at the 8-Ball, which is where one usually went in Sandviken after midnight when every other place closed. Daniel and I had been reading up on Wittgenstein, and gave Frank a kind of briefing, the gist of it. Frank is always eager to absorb pertinent intellectual gossip.

We came to discuss a certain point, literally a parenthesis in the Tractatus, proclaiming the secret identity of ethics = aesthetics. Crudely put: the good is the lovely; or, to act well is to act beautifully. At least that is how we experience it. The convivial atmosphere invited us to treat wild ideas as if they were certainly true, and Frank was delighted about this proposition.

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There’s a lot of moral feeling throughout Vincent’s letters, often connected with his views on art. It would be awkward to try to express this feeling in terms of either pure ethics or pure aesthetics. It has probably been written about in the literature on van Gogh, of which I am sadly ignorant. Bear with me as I try to explain it anyway.

As I see it, it calls for a kind of ideal of harmony, or mutuality, between two elements that I’ve come to think about as “earth” and “life.” These two elements are associated with the past and the present, respectively, and also with other dualities: darkness and light, background and foreground, countryside and city, and so on. This scheme may seem very general and abstract, not to mention vague. But I can’t help seeing it like this.

The earthly landscape symbolizing the past is a theme of The Spell of the Sensuous, the book by David Abram I keep coming back to. He asks: “Where, within the visible landscape, can we locate the past and the future?” The answer, inspired by Heidegger, might have appealed to van Gogh:

“Of course, we may say that we perceive the past all around us, in great trees grown from seeds that germinated long ago, in the eroded banks of a meandering stream, or the widening cracks in an old road. [But primarily,] what we commonly term ‘the past’ would seem to be rooted in our carnal sense of that which is hidden under the ground—of that which resists, and thus supports, the living present.”

The theme of the ancient ground that “supports the living present” is all over van Gogh’s paintings and letters. For example, in The Potato Eaters, the nutritious nightshade tubers from the underworld shine like moons and exhale life-giving steam, as the peasants (with heads “the colour of a good dusty potato”) share familial warmth.

“I very often think that peasants are a world apart, in many respects one so much better than the civilized world. […] I’ve tried to bring out the idea that these people eating potatoes by the light of their lamp have dug the earth with the self-same hands they are now putting into the dish, and it thus suggests manual labor and – a meal honestly earned.”

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As his style develops, the “nostalgic” element fades away, and the gestalts of plants, people, houses, and things come to the foreground as alive, strong, and vividly present. He explains to Theo:

“If one draws a pollard willow as if it were a living being, which after all is what it is, then the surroundings follow almost by themselves, provided only that one has focused all one’s attention on that particular tree and not rested until there was some life in it.”

Here’s van Gogh praising a fellow artist:

“Even when he draws bricks, granite, iron bars or the railing of a bridge, Meryon puts into his etchings something of the human soul, moved by I know not what inner sorrow.”

This “inner sorrow” is also vivid in van Gogh’s paintings. It’s one reason his later landscapes are so fascinating and disturbing:

“What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn’t anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish. In short, I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly.”

Yet in this too, the harmony of darkness and light plays its part:

“Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”

How can one find this musical harmony—and keep it? This seems to be Vincent’s great ethical-aesthetical question, the struggle of his tragic life.

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Early on, van Gogh worked as a preacher in Dordrecht, where he fell in love with the light’s “golden glow,” painted by Aelbert Cuyp, one of his heroes from the Dutch Golden Age. Vincent’s sermons were inspired and beautiful, as sermons often are, full of warmth and intensity, playing a kind of divine lead melody over the chthonic chords of the rural earth.

“From infancy we grow up to boys and girls – young men and women – and if God spares us and helps us, to husbands and wives, Fathers and Mothers in our turn, and then, slowly but surely the face that once had the early dew of morning, gets its wrinkles, the eyes that once beamed with youth and gladness speak of a sincere deep and earnest sadness, though they may keep the fire of Faith, Hope and Charity – though they may beam with God’s spirit. The hair turns grey or we lose it – ah – indeed we only pass through the earth, we only pass through life, we are strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”

He wrote to Theo about a “longing for religion among the people in the cities:”

“Many a worker in a factory or shop has had a strange, beautiful and pious youth. But city life sometimes removes ‘the early dew of the morning.’ Even so, the longing for ‘the old, old story’ remains. What is at the bottom of the heart stays at the bottom of the heart.”

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It’s fascinating to follow how Vincent’s outlook changes as he becomes more a city man, through his years in Paris, hanging out in coffeehouses with new friends like Gauguin, Monet, Seurat, and Pisarro. A still life painted in memory of his deceased father, also a preacher, makes the contrast explicit: the painting shows a large, heavy Bible on a table next to a novel by Zola named La joie de vivre. Still, he retained a love of Christ, “the artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh.”

I, like Philip Lopate, fell in love at first sight of Bresson’s 1950 movie Diary of a Country Priest, and any number of Bergman movies, not to mention Pär Lagerkvist’s anguished poems. Unfortunately, my lack of faith prevented me from becoming a Christian pastor or monk. Instead I took up Zen. Van Gogh also went through a period of admiring Japanese wisdom:

“If we study Japanese art, we discover a man who is undeniably wise, philosophical and intelligent, who spends his time – doing what? Studying the distance from the earth to the moon? No! Studying the politics of Bismarck? No! He studies … a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw all the plants – then the seasons, the grand spectacle of landscapes, finally animals, then the human figure. […] So come, isn’t what we are taught by these simple Japanese, who live in nature as if they themselves were flowers, almost a true religion?”

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When I started doing Zen meditation, I sometimes evangelized about it to my brother, as condescendingly and repeatedly as Vincent when he writes to Theo with life advice:

“smoke a pipe when you are downcast;”

“dispose of your books;”

“do not immerse yourself too deeply in the worldly mire;”

“go on doing a lot of walking & keep up your love of nature;”

“enjoy yourself too much rather than too little;”

“don’t take art or love too seriously;”

“go and fall in love yourself and tell me about it;”

“become an artist;”

and so on. There is a lot of advice in Vincent’s letters, much of it eminently worth following. Here is my favorite, a perfect remedy when life seems barren:

“Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring at you like some imbecile.”

Indeed, just slap anything on. This too combines the ethical and the aesthetical. He goes on:

“The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. […] Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, disheartening, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.”

This might not be a foolproof method for attaining serenity, but it’s a way to create motion, shake things up, probe the possibilities of this world. It is basically why I moved to Holland, and why I started this museum series. I think it is excellent advice. In the words of The Mountain Goats:

do every stupid thing

that makes you feel alive do every stupid thing

to try to drive the dark away let people call you crazy

for the choices that you make climb limits past the limits

jump in front of trains all day and stay alive

just stay alive

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I have decided to spare you my theory about van Gogh as the ur-hipster. But he was undeniably a freelancer, a starving artist, and something of an outcast. He didn’t like job-seeking or sucking up to company managers:

“Now, one of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do. It is not just a question of my appearance, which is what they have sanctimoniously reproached me with, it goes deeper, I do assure you.”

He was deeply confident about his own artistic ability, even so confident that he could write clearly about his need to get better. He kept making paintings even as Theo failed to sell them. Not because he shunned making money, but because:

“what I’m trying for is the shortest means to that end – on the understanding that the work is of genuine and lasting merit, which I can only expect if I put something really good into it and make an honest study of nature, not if I work exclusively with an eye to saleability – for which one is bound to suffer later.”

As for the madness he would develop later, he was conscious about the Romantic idea of the mad artist, but didn’t subscribe to it. He viewed his “episodes” as temporary aberrations, clinical in nature, not essential to his character or art. Throughout his life he managed his melancholy moods by travelling, working hard, being outdoors, and so on. In short there is much to learn from Vincent’s attitude.

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I have talked about the past and the present in van Gogh’s paintings and letters, but there is also the future. He was enthusiastic about the future of art, eager to help prepare the ground for later generations of artists:

“There is an art of the future, and it will be so lovely and so young that even if we do give up our youth for it, we can only gain in serenity by it.”

And aside from art, he reckoned that earthly life itself must have much in store:

“Science – scientific reasoning – strikes me as being an instrument that will go a very long way in the future. For look: people used to think that the earth was flat. […] Life, too, is probably round, and much greater in scope and possibilities than the hemisphere we now know.”

Indeed the world seems to have changed a lot since van Gogh’s days. Have we finally discovered life’s true shape? Well… we have seen past some horizons. These hopes of van Gogh and the other fin de siécle artists were interrupted by the world wars and generally thwarted by greed, corruption, and stupidity. But still, the world has in many respects become more open and more delightful. I think these artists helped pave the way for that. I guess it makes sense that our most sacred museums are devoted to modern artists.

It’s quite amazing that a museum about this “shaggy sheepdog” is now Amsterdam’s most famous museum, indeed on the European top ten, jostling shoulder-to-shoulder with the Rijksmuseum that he loved.

And it’s beautiful to see the long entrance lines (especially since Museumkaart holders skip ahead); to hear parents with their kids explaining certain paintings; to see a triptych of grey-clothed girls giggling at one of his selfies (one lingered longer—why?); and just to know that van Gogh’s struggle became, somehow, globally meaningful.