Unwilling to relinquish self-confidence

Vincent van Gogh to Wilhelmina van Gogh, from Paris, Summer-Fall 1887

By far the greatest number of grains of corn do not develop fully but end up at the mill - isn't this so? To compare human beings with grains of corn, now - in every human being who is healthy and natural there is a germinating force, just as there is in a grain of corn. And so natural life is germination. What the germinating force is to the grain, love is to us.

Now we tend to stand about pulling a long face and at a loss for words, I think, when, thwarted in our natural development, we find that germination has been foiled and we ourselves placed in circumstances as hopeless as they must be for a grain between the millstones.

When that happens to us and we are utterly bewildered by the loss of our natural life, there are some amongst us who, though ready to submit to the inevitable, are yet unwilling to relinquish their self-confidence, and determine to discover what is the matter with them and what is really happening.

Letter W01
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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