1890, Auvers-sur-Oise.
I am thirty-seven years old and the mornings here in Auvers open like pale wounds that at once become doors, the white of the sky before sunrise so thin it is almost not there, and then suddenly all the wheat, the roofs, the paths, the cypresses farther off, the church tower, the chalk of the roads, even the black crows when they rise late and violently as if shaken out of the fields by some hand under the earth, all of it begins to burn without flame and then there is only one possible answer to that kind of light, which is work, work at once, work before the pressure changes its colour, before the afternoon comes with its pushing, with the inward crowding that is not merely in the head but in the whole air around the head, as if the day itself had leaned too close. I know the pace at which I am painting is the pace of a man pursued, and I know also that pursuit has its own sort of brightness, the hunted animal sees the stubble and ditch and sky with a sharpness the calm one never attains, and because it is sharp it appears truer, and because it appears truer it must be painted, and so I paint it.
Theo arranged Auvers from Paris as he arranges nearly everything that keeps me joined to the world of the living and the practical, and because he arranged it with love I accepted it at once as if what had been solved on paper had therefore been solved in the blood as well. The Ravoux inn, the room under the roof, the nearness to Paris, the introduction to Dr Gachet, the doctor who is himself another kind of patient and for that reason perhaps less cruelly medical than the men at Saint-Remy, all of it came through Theo’s hands and through the soft persistence with which he continues to believe in me beyond what prudence, family, money, and even his own fatigue ought to allow. It is a dangerous thing to be believed in so steadily, because one begins to feel that one must answer not with ordinary gratitude but with revelation, with work high enough and hot enough to justify the faith by becoming more than work, by becoming necessity, by becoming, yes, proof.
I have been in Auvers six weeks. The canvases rise in the room like sheaves stacked after a dangerous harvest and I count them and when I count them I feel not pride but the hurried ticking one hears in a room where something invisible is being packed away. Seventy canvases since May perhaps, sometimes one a day, sometimes more of a day than one painting ought to contain, and the number is not abundance in the comfortable sense, it is extraction, as though the place had veins full of blue, green, yellow, lilac, red, black, wheat-gold, roof-red, cloud-white, and if I do not press hard and quickly enough all that ore will close over and the field will become merely a field again and not what it is now, which is a cry spread flat under the sky.
I write because the letters to Theo are full and faithful and yet bent, always bent a little by tenderness, by the wish not to increase the strain under which he is already living, with Jo and the child and the gallery and the money and the uncertainty of his own health and the uncertainty that my existence places in every one of his days. So the letters tell the truth and steer the truth and in steering it cool it. Here I will not cool it. Here the thing may flare as it is. What I know and do not write to Theo is that the condition in Auvers is not absent but sharpened into morning usefulness, and usefulness is not the same as safety. The mornings save me by being full enough to enter. The afternoons begin to pulse. The evenings may widen into abysses or else collapse into a kind of ash where one feels only spent and vacant and already half removed. Between those states there is the easel, and the easel is not cure, no, but it is shape, and shape is the only dignity left to a feeling when it has become too large to be borne dumbly.
If this sounds like exaggeration it is because moderation belongs to healthier men. When I take the path out past the gardens, toward the wheat fields under the broad Auvers sky, everything comes at me in its final colours, not last because they are ending, though perhaps they are, but last because there is no veil left over them. The green is green as if struck on a bell. The blue does not sit above the fields but presses into them. The yellow is a metal being poured. The church stands not only on the hill but in the chest. The roads divide not only the country but the feeling. I do not mean this poetically. I mean that the world has become inseparable from what it does to me and therefore can only be painted at that temperature if it is to be painted honestly. The doctors would call that symptom. Let them. A symptom may still tell the truth if one listens to what it is saying rather than merely naming the fever.
