with the strength of renewed youth.”
Like the Romantics he admired, however, Vincent found danger as well as comfort in the immense impassivity of nature. One could both lose oneself in the immensity and feel oneself diminished; be both inspired and overwhelmed. For Vincent, nature would always have this double edge: it both consoled him in his loneliness and reminded him of his alienation from the world—especially a world where nature and family were so intimately intertwined. Was he alone with God’s creation, or just abandoned? Periodically throughout his life, he would seek comfort in his troubles by lurching into the wilderness, only to find more loneliness there and end up returning to the world in search of the human companionship that always eluded him, even in childhood, even in his own family.
To fill the emptiness, Vincent began to collect—an activity that would follow him, incongruously, throughout a vagabond life. As if trying to capture and bring home the companionship he found in nature, he began collecting and categorizing the wildflowers that grew along the creekbank and in the meadows. He used his knowledge of the fugitive birds to start a collection of their eggs. Then, when the birds flew south, he collected their nests. Beetles became his all-consuming passion—the first of many. He skimmed them off the creek and flushed them out of the bushes with a fishnet, then stored them in a bottle to take back to the parsonage, where his sisters squealed in horror at his trophies.
A lifetime of lonely, obsessive activity began in Vincent’s attic room, where he spent evening after evening studying and categorizing his collections: identifying varieties of wildflowers and recording where the rarest ones grew; examining the differences between the nests of thrushes and blackbirds, finches and wrens (“Truly birds such as the wren and the golden oriole rank among artists, too,” he concluded). He made little boxes to display his bug collection, carefully lining each box with paper, pinning the specimens inside, then neatly labeling each with its proper Latin name—“such horribly long names,” Lies recalled, “yet [Vincent] knew them all.”
On a rainy day in October 1864, Dorus and Anna van Gogh bundled their angry, alienated son into the family’s yellow carriage and drove him thirteen miles north to the town of Zevenbergen. There, on the steps of a boarding school, they said good-bye to eleven-year-old Vincent and drove away.
ANNA AND DORUS’S EFFORTS to educate their eldest son in Zundert had ended in frustration and failure. When Vincent was seven, they had marched him off to the new public school just across the Markt from the parsonage. Prior to the building of the new school, the state of education in Zundert, as in all ofBrabant, had been “not worth a button,” according to one angry parent. Most local families did not even bother to send their children to school (illiteracy was rampant); or, if they did, sent them to one of the many illegal schools run out of private homes where instruction was dominated by Catholic teachings and schedules more accommodating of chores and harvest times.
But Anna saw education as yet another privilege and duty of class—like promenading and dressing up—a display of status as well as a preparation for moving successfully in the right circles. Anna and Dorus had reason to believe that Vincent would succeed at school. He was smart and well prepared (he could probably read and write by the age of seven). But Vincent’s obstreperousness soon ran afoul of the disciplinarian schoolmaster Jan Dirks, who had a reputation for “boxing the ears” of recalcitrant students. A classmate remembered that Vincent “got into mischief” and was “beaten from time to time,” a development that undoubtedly contributed to his chronic truancy.
Anna and Dorus tried everything to salvage their son’s foundering education: private tutorials, evening classes, even
Like the Romantics he admired, however, Vincent found danger as well as comfort in the immense impassivity of nature. One could both lose oneself in the immensity and feel oneself diminished; be both inspired and overwhelmed. For Vincent, nature would always have this double edge: it both consoled him in his loneliness and reminded him of his alienation from the world—especially a world where nature and family were so intimately intertwined. Was he alone with God’s creation, or just abandoned? Periodically throughout his life, he would seek comfort in his troubles by lurching into the wilderness, only to find more loneliness there and end up returning to the world in search of the human companionship that always eluded him, even in childhood, even in his own family.
To fill the emptiness, Vincent began to collect—an activity that would follow him, incongruously, throughout a vagabond life. As if trying to capture and bring home the companionship he found in nature, he began collecting and categorizing the wildflowers that grew along the creekbank and in the meadows. He used his knowledge of the fugitive birds to start a collection of their eggs. Then, when the birds flew south, he collected their nests. Beetles became his all-consuming passion—the first of many. He skimmed them off the creek and flushed them out of the bushes with a fishnet, then stored them in a bottle to take back to the parsonage, where his sisters squealed in horror at his trophies.
A lifetime of lonely, obsessive activity began in Vincent’s attic room, where he spent evening after evening studying and categorizing his collections: identifying varieties of wildflowers and recording where the rarest ones grew; examining the differences between the nests of thrushes and blackbirds, finches and wrens (“Truly birds such as the wren and the golden oriole rank among artists, too,” he concluded). He made little boxes to display his bug collection, carefully lining each box with paper, pinning the specimens inside, then neatly labeling each with its proper Latin name—“such horribly long names,” Lies recalled, “yet [Vincent] knew them all.”
On a rainy day in October 1864, Dorus and Anna van Gogh bundled their angry, alienated son into the family’s yellow carriage and drove him thirteen miles north to the town of Zevenbergen. There, on the steps of a boarding school, they said good-bye to eleven-year-old Vincent and drove away.
ANNA AND DORUS’S EFFORTS to educate their eldest son in Zundert had ended in frustration and failure. When Vincent was seven, they had marched him off to the new public school just across the Markt from the parsonage. Prior to the building of the new school, the state of education in Zundert, as in all ofBrabant, had been “not worth a button,” according to one angry parent. Most local families did not even bother to send their children to school (illiteracy was rampant); or, if they did, sent them to one of the many illegal schools run out of private homes where instruction was dominated by Catholic teachings and schedules more accommodating of chores and harvest times.
But Anna saw education as yet another privilege and duty of class—like promenading and dressing up—a display of status as well as a preparation for moving successfully in the right circles. Anna and Dorus had reason to believe that Vincent would succeed at school. He was smart and well prepared (he could probably read and write by the age of seven). But Vincent’s obstreperousness soon ran afoul of the disciplinarian schoolmaster Jan Dirks, who had a reputation for “boxing the ears” of recalcitrant students. A classmate remembered that Vincent “got into mischief” and was “beaten from time to time,” a development that undoubtedly contributed to his chronic truancy.
Anna and Dorus tried everything to salvage their son’s foundering education: private tutorials, evening classes, even
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