In front of us lies the stage of life and we have to paint and arrange things to live, not necessarily with purpose. It is sad, to have not a good environment to evolve, to create, to think, and express ourselves in a myriad of forms a human being can transform as a product of his extraordinary capacities, making each individual unique (my cat surely think the same right now since she is calling me for some care). Vincent Van Gogh once said: “We spend our whole lives in unconscious exercise of the art of expressing our thoughts with the help of words.” He is an example of someone that wanted to live above the normal stage of life, that wants in striking colors, distorted shapes and primitive brush strokes, to unravel the secrets of life, to express life itself, not in words, but in mysterious pictures.
In general what I read about van Gogh is that he was demented but if we look at each story that intends to depicts him with psychiatric ailments, I see other things, I see van Gogh as a perturbed man, but because he wanted to live intensely at another level of existence, surrounded with lovely people that are hidden under the cover of a society based on reputation and achievements and competition.
As a side story, yesterday it happened something unusual. In my institute, I met by chance a funny and intelligent guy, a scientist from the Nord European hemisphere. And I said in front of my colleagues and with some release of the soul: “Finally, someone fun and intelligent!”. Indeed, nowadays it’s very unusual to meet interesting people, what we meet are people with positions, with the status that they keep as a secret weapon, not giving evidence of qualities wide open to anyone to see. Who wants to be normalized?