One of the perks of my loft bed is that I can have a whole stash of books tucked down the side and they don't fall off. 'The Yellow House' by Martin Gayford has been renewed several times as other things have interrupted the reading. (I think I read a review of another of his books and the library happened to have this one.) It tells the story of a brief period in 1888 when Paul Gauguin lived with Vincent Van Gogh in a house in Arles. It was just such an interesting book because it gives you the two artists as real people, their lives together and the impact they had on each other's work. It is a detailed timeline of the works they produced during this brief intense period. Vincent had this idea of creating a place where artists could come and work together and share ideas and influences. He had set a lot of store by his invitation to Gauguin and admired him greatly, though it turned out Vincent himself was not an easy person to live with. There is much discussion of the art they created but it also charts the development of the crisis in Vincent's mental health, an issue that had haunted his life and would lead finally to him taking his own life. The books brings to life the real person behind the myth that is Vincent.
"Of course, there's the mundane sense in which we 'need' to do all sorts of things: in order to pay the rent, you must generate an income; if you do that by working at a job, you'd better meet your employer's requirements, or you can expect to run into trouble. If you have kids, it's generally a good idea to provide them with food and clothing. But we overlay this everyday sense of obligation with the existential duty described above: the feeling that we need to get things done not only to achieve certain ends, or to meet our basic responsibilities to others, but because it's a cosmic debt we've somehow incurred in exchange for being alive. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written, 'we produce against the feeling of lack'. Our frenetic activity is often an effort to shore up a sense of ourselves as minimally acceptable members of society." (p.21)
Designed to be read over four weeks, not as a blueprint for 'action' but as a guide to considering different kinds of problems and getting comfortable with imperfection, insecurity, and inevitable oblivion, and I was left with much to ponder.
I very much liked this analysis of Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' poem (which I understand he grew to hate since it was so much requested at readings), taking a closer and slightly alternative reading of it, and it kind of sums up much of the book's message: "Frost's poem undermines the conventional reading on almost every line. No sooner has the speaker told us about the road less travelled than he admits that, in fact, previous travellers had left the two paths worn 'really about the same'. And on closer examination, he never asserts that his choice of path 'made all the difference' in his life, either. How could he know, since he never got to compare it to the other one? What the speaker of the poem may be saying is that 'ages and ages hence' when he's an old man, he expects that's what he'll claim. Because he'll want to rationalise the choices he made - like everyone else does.
The true insight of Frost's poem, on this interpretation, isn't that you should opt for an unconventional life. It's that the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you're inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can't ever know in advance what the best choice might be. In fact, you'll never know in hindsight, either - because not matter how great or how appalling the consequences of heading down any given path, you'll never learn whether heading down a different one might have brought something better or worse. Even so, to move forward, you still have to choose, and keep on choosing." (p.49-50)
