I saw Van Gogh paintings for the first time the other day. I mean really, really saw them. I peered as as closely as I could, looking like a fool while the tip of my nose nearly touched the crests of the textured brushstokes. I saw the excitement and pride in the boldness of The Yellow House and the celebration of life in Sunflowers. Van Gogh's favorite color is yellow too, and used it as an expression of utter happiness.
Relatively speaking, there isn't much yellow in Van Gogh's paintings.
Unlike his contemporaries, Van Gogh had difficulty painting images from his imagination and instead preferred being outside with an easel and a newly-invented paint tube and painting exactly what was there in front of him. I used to think his paintings looked cartoonish and unreal, almost like child's play. I never understood why he stood out as great next to painters like Grandjean, for instance, who painted scenes of 19th century Paris in such detail it were as if digital photography existed during that time period. That, to me, was skill. That was reproducing exactly what came before his eyes. Paintings as meticulous as this, however, were not exactly what Van Gogh saw, felt, smelt, and tasted. Van Gogh painted the floppiness of the grass, the fragility of the flower, the invisible wind. He painted the passage of time, not an artificially frozen scene. What is more true of a human experience than that?
Toward the end of his life, Van Gogh painted scenes of the French countryside--almost one every single day. He could taste it in those last few years more than ever before: that transience of living that one comes to realize most, I think, right before death. There is little yellow used in these paintings. The countryside was where, Van Gogh believed, man was most in touch with the loneliness, solidarity, and tragedy of a human person. It was also here that he believed man could find his strength.
I struggle fiercely with the concept of finding strength in loneliness, probably because I hate the feeling so much. In thoughts and in conversations, I've tried to convince myself and others that there is not an essential tragedy to living because we will always be given the tools we need to achieve a small kind of happiness that may not satisfy, but gives us a hope great enough to overcome loneliness of being in a world our souls were not made for. The restlessness of humanity is one that brings joy and nothing else.
But I think I may have been taking optimism too far. I think I may have been wrong.
Thomas Merton says, “The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.”
Peace in loneliness.
We cannot cling. I cannot cling. I have to have faith in something other than the physical comfort of an embrace because it is not here, truly, that I will find comfort. I cannot freeze that moment, and neither will its memory be enough to sustain me through the rest of my cold and lonely days which will inevitably come. Now is a better time than any to remember this: here, in Spain, where I am so completely aware of the loneliness that comes with the passage of time although there are no changing leaves to remind me. There is a reality to loneliness incomparable to the touch of warm hand, and I'm blindly fumbling to feel it. This is the tragedy of living.
"Not in countries far away do we discover what the Lord is asking of us; he directs us within ourselves, within our hearts, for he has put what he asks of us inside us." --Saint Caesarius of Arles
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