A Great Fire in Our Soul
Background
In the summer of 1880 Vincent van Gogh was twenty-seven and, by every outside measure, a failure. He had failed as an art dealer, a teacher and a bookseller, and been dismissed as a lay preacher among the coal miners of the Borinage in Belgium. He was living in a miner’s house, poor and alone, and hadn’t written to his younger brother Theo in nearly a year.
Then Theo sent him some money, and Vincent wrote to thank him — in French, at great length, and with his whole heart. He compares himself to a bird in a cage that knows it is good for something. He tells Theo that the way to know God is to love many things. And he writes the lines about the fire in the soul that people have been copying out ever since.
Within weeks he had picked up his pencil again. He had ten years left, and in them he made more than two thousand works of art. Theo paid for most of it, and they wrote to each other for the rest of Vincent’s life.
From the letter
Cuesmes
July 1880
My Dear Theo,
· · ·
So you must not think that I disavow things; I am rather faithful in my unfaithfulness, and though changed, I am the same, and my only anxiety is: how can I be of use in the world, cannot I serve some purpose and be of any good, how can I learn more and study profoundly certain subjects? You see, that is what preoccupies me constantly, and then I feel myself imprisoned by poverty, excluded from participating in certain work, and certain necessary things are beyond my reach. That is one reason for not being without melancholy, and then one feels an emptiness where there might be friendship and strong and serious affections, and one feels a terrible discouragement gnawing at one’s very moral energy, and fate seems to put a barrier to the instincts of affection, and a flood of disgust rises to choke one. And one exclaims “How long, my God!”
Well, what shall I say; our inward thoughts, do they ever show outwardly? There may be a great fire in our soul, and no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers by see only a little bit of smoke coming through the chimney, and pass on their way. Now, look here, what must be done, must one tend that inward fire, have salt in oneself, wait patiently yet with how much impatience for the hour when somebody will come and sit down near it, — to stay there maybe? Let him who believes in God wait for the hour that will come sooner or later.
· · ·
But I always think, that the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something, whatever you like, you will be in the right way to know more about it, that is what I say to myself. But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better and more. That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith.
· · ·
One cannot always tell what it is, that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but, however, one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks: “My God! is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity!” Do you know what frees one from this captivity? it is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. But without this one remains in prison.
There where sympathy is renewed, life is restored.
· · ·
Letter 133, written in French and translated by Theo’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to His Brother, 1872–1886 (Constable / Houghton Mifflin, 1927), now in the public domain. It was Johanna who gathered and published the letters, and kept Vincent’s work in the world. Every letter, with the originals, is at the Van Gogh Museum’s vangoghletters.org.