Nellie Hermann - The Season of Migration

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For M. H. and for entirely different idlers everywhere

Though I fall ninety-nine times, the hundredth time I shall stand.

Vincent van Gogh, November 19, 1881

Contents

September 3, 1879

Petit Wasmes, the Borinage mining district, Belgium

Dear Theo,

It was quite a long time ago that we saw each other or wrote to each other as we used to. All the same, its better that we feel something for each other rather than behave like corpses toward each other, so I am putting my hand to paper to reach out to you.

Its mainly to tell you that Im grateful for your visit that Im writing to you. The hours we spent together those weeks ago have at least assured us that were both still in the land of the living. When I saw you again and took a walk with you, I felt more cheerful and alive than I have for a long time, because in spite of myself life has gradually become or has seemed much less precious to me, much more unimportant and indifferent. When one lives with others and is bound by a feeling of affection one is aware that one has a reason for being, that one might not be entirely worthless and superfluous but perhaps good for one thing or another. It has been a quite a while since I have felt this way. A prisoner who is kept in isolation, who is prevented from working, would in the long run suffer the consequences just as surely as one who went hungry for too long. Like everyone else, I have need of relationships of friendship or affection or trusting companionship, and am not like a street pump or lamppost, whether of stone or iron.

Since my dismissal as lay preacher in July, yes, you are right, I have been waiting for something, and I dont know what. You call this idling ; I do not. You say I am not the same any longer; I say perhaps, but what man is? This time I am trying to do things right.

I have been wandering through mining country, a man in exile, a castaway, a snake wriggling out of its skin. I move between my room in Cuesmes at the evangelist Franks housewith a bed and a desk and a worn carpet on the floorand the room where I write from now, the abandoned salon in Petit Wasmes, a few miles away, where the floor is dirty and the few chairs are strewn across the space. I prefer the salon to the furnished room; it suits me better, and I appreciate the notion that no one can see me. I walk the landscape, I sit by the mine, in the cemetery, in the open fields covered with soot, unaware of the time, guiding myself only by the movement of the sun. I carry stacks of paper and occasionally sketch on my knees, quick strokes of what I see. Often, after I have done so, I tear up the paper and let the wind carry the strips away.

Yes, this is what I have been doing, Theo, but it is not idling. I have been trying to be patient, to be calm, to make no sudden moves. I am trying to do things right this time, to listen, to hear, to see. Great forces are shifting in me; I must let them take their time. I have been riding the waves of these forces as if I were in the ocean: some nights, they cast me to the floor, where I weep into the dirt; other nights, they are calm, and I feel I can see the land ahead.

As I think back on your visit with thankfulness, our talks naturally come to mind. Ive heard such talks before, many, in fact, and often. You said, Do you not wish for improvement in your life? Plans for improvement and change and raising the spiritsdont let it anger you, but Im a little afraid of them, because I have acted upon them before and ended up rather disappointed. How much in the past has been well thought out that is, however, impracticable!

Improvement in my lifeshould I not desire it or should I not be in need of improvement? I really want to improve. But its precisely because I yearn for it that Im afraid of remedies that are worse than the disease. Can you blame a sick person if he looks the doctor straight in the eye and prefers not to be treated wrongly or by a quack?

And if you should now assume from what Ive said that I intended to say that you were a quack because of your advice then you will have completely misunderstood me, since I have no such idea or opinion of you. If, on the other hand, you think that I would do well to take your advice literally and become a lithographer of invoice headings and visiting cards, or a bookkeeper or carpenters apprentice, you would also be mistaken. Supposing it were possible for us to assume the guise of a baker or a hair-cutter or librarian with lightning speed, it would still be a foolish answer, rather like the way the man acted who, when accused of heartlessness because he was sitting on a donkey, immediately dismounted and continued on his way with the donkey on his shoulders.

But, you say, Im not giving you this advice for you to follow to the letter, but because I thought you had a taste for idling and because I was of the opinion that you should put an end to it.

Might I be allowed to point out to you that such idling is really a rather strange sort of idling? It is rather difficult for me to defend myself on this score, but I will be sorry if you cant eventually see this in a different light. Idling? The word makes me crazy; I wish it were a tangible thing so I could light it on fire.

I went to visit our parents after you left here, just as you suggested I do. They were surprised to see me, Pa answering the door in his suit, Ma standing behind him in her apron, as if they were expecting a visit from a holy angel. I was a disappointment, as usual. It was oppressive to be there, everything in that house reminding me of earlier times, when we were brothers in all the senses of the word, and I kept thinking of you turning your back on me to get on the train to Paris. I left there after only a few days. Our parents handed me an envelope containing money, and they said it was from you, though there was no note. I have not touched the moneyit sits in the desk in my room in Cuesmesbut I wonder about it. After a visit like we had, what could you mean by such a gift, and without so much as an acknowledgment of what has passed between us?

If I must seriously feel that Im annoying or burdensome to you or those at home, useful for neither one thing nor another, and were to go on being forced to feel like an intruder or a fifth wheel in your presence, so that it would be better if I werent thereif I think that indeed it will be so and cannot be otherwise, then Im overcome by a feeling of sorrow and I must struggle against despair. Its difficult for me to bear these thoughts and more difficult still to bear the thought that so much discord, misery and sorrow, in our midst and in our family, has been caused by me.

If it were indeed so, then Id truly wish that it be granted me not to have to go on living too long. Yet whenever this depresses me beyond measure, after a long time the thought also occurs to me: its perhaps only a bad, terrible dream, and later well perhaps learn to understand and comprehend it better. But is it not, after all, reality, and wont it one day become better rather than worse? Sometimes in winter its so bitterly cold that one says, its simply too cold, what do I care whether summer comes, the bad outweighs the good. But whether we like it or not, an end finally comes to the hard frost, and one fine morning the wind has turned and we have a thaw. Comparing the natural state of the weather with our state of mind and our circumstances, subject to variableness and change, I still have some hope that it can improve.