Farewell

 

 Vincent Willem van Gogh

Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul Hospital with a Reaper (1889)

 

Si muero,
dejad el balcón abierto.

El niño come naranjas.
(Desde mi balcón lo veo).

El segador siega el trigo.
(Desde mi balcón lo siento).

¡Si muero,
dejad el balcón abierto!

Federico García Lorca, Despedida, in Canciones (1921-1924)

If I die,
Leave the balcony open.

The boy is eating oranges.
(From my balcony I hear him.)

The reaper scythes the wheat.
(From my balcony I feel it.)

If I die,
Leave the balcony open!

Federico García Lorca, Farewell, in Songs (1921-1924)

Prison and Loving

D-block cell, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, San Francisco / © I.A. Daglis

Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead.

Vincent Van Gogh [Letter 133 to Theo, Cuesmes (Belgium), July 1880]

take death to reach a star

Star-forming region N90 / Image: NASA, ESA, STScI/AURA

In a painter's life, death is not perhaps the hardest thing there is. For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train.

Vincent Van Gogh [Letter 506 to Theo, Arles, 9 July 1888]

Η νύχτα

Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Η νύχτα φανερώνει κόσμους που κρύβει το φως.


π. Νικόλαος Χατζηνικολάου (Μητροπολίτης Μεσογαίας, MΑ Harvard, MS MIT, PhD MIT)

Death

For I see in this reaper – a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task – I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is – if you like – the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there’s nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.

Vincent Van Gogh, Letter 604 to his brother Theo