Feb.04.2007
Tribute to Van Gogh
I said to myself, in spite of everything I shall rise again:
I will take up my pencil, which
I have forsaken in my great discouragement,
and I will go on with my drawing.
From that moment everything has seemed transformed for me,
and I will go on.
The best way to know God is to love many things.
Love a friend,
a wife, something -
and you will be on the way to knowing more about Him;
that is what I say to myself.
But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy,
with strength, with intelligence…
What am I in most people’s eyes?
A nonentity, or an eccentric and disagreeable man…
I should want my work to show what is in the heart
of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.
This is my ambition, which is,
in spite of everything,
founded less on anger than on love.