Arles, November 1888
I was introduced to Vincent van Gogh this evening by a mutual acquaintance from Paris. We sat in a cafe near the Place du Forum for two hours. He talked about color and light with a precision that was almost scientific and a passion that was entirely the opposite of scientific. He talked about the cypresses outside the city as though they were alive in a way that other trees were not.
He drew on the tablecloth while we spoke. Not absent-mindedly. Deliberately. He was drawing as a way of thinking, the way some people talk with their hands. The drawing was of the light inside the cafe, which is ordinary light, but in his hand it became something else, something about the relationship between light and the objects it inhabits. I kept the piece of tablecloth. I still have it.
He is thirty-five years old. He seems much older, not in his face but in the weight behind his eyes. He has been painting with the urgency of someone who can feel time running out even if he cannot explain why. The paintings he showed me from this season are unlike anything I have seen in a century of following artists through their studios.
The year is almost over. He will cut off his ear next month. He will die in two years. I do not know these things yet. I am only learning them later, reading backward through a life that burned exactly as fast as it looked like it would burn. Recognition. Always too late, and always, somehow, not quite too late enough.