“I would gladly give ten years of my life if I could sit in front of this painting for two weeks on end, with only a crust of dry bread for food.”
These words were supposedly uttered by Vincent van Gogh, who is, of course, one of the painters best-known in Japan. As for the painting he mentions in this legendary quote, which someone like me probably couldn’t come up with even if she wracked her brains for a full ten years, I believe it was by Rembrandt. I wonder if, faced with that selfsame painting, a philistine like me would feel the way Van Gogh did.
Now, I’ll take advantage of my claim to ignorance to admit that when I heard this quote, what it made me think of was that immortal masterwork we read in elementary school, A Dog of Flanders. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t know the tragic tale of the young boy Nello and his dog Patrasche (make that “anyone in Japan,” since apparently the novel is known only to a select few connoisseurs in its own country, if you can believe it). My elementary-school self wept just like everyone else over the last scene, in which the earnest Nello, who aspires to be a painter, is beckoned to heaven alongside his canine companion as he basks in the glory of the Rubens triptych he had always longed to see.
The tears were pouring down my cheeks.
But there is one questionable point in this tragic tale that the gloomy contrarian of a fourteen-year-old into whom that unpleasantly ingenuous elementary schooler transformed cannot bring herself to overlook. I do want to voice my doubts about the general morality of this tale of unrewarded virtue, in which Nello (a boy so poor he not only can’t go to an exhibition of the one painting he most longs to see, but he even loses the very roof over his head) is honest enough to turn in some money he finds, only to die in obscurity without ever learning of the approbation of his own paintings. But the point I really can’t get past is this: How did a boy who couldn’t even afford food or shelter, who was standing at death’s door along with his beloved dog, find the money to go see that painting?
I can hardly imagine that virtuous Nello and his dog, having just performed the beautiful act of returning some lost money, would be so morally inconsistent as to then sneak into the church where the painting hung without paying the cost of admission. But that, in fact, is the very conclusion the story leaves the reader to draw.
For years I’ve been wracked with guilt over the sin of harboring such a tactless objection to such a deeply moving tale of tragedy. So in the hopes that even if I couldn’t expect a satisfying answer, I could at least share my pent-up feelings, I decided to make a clean breast of it─almost like going to confession (speaking of churches).
“…”
As usual, however, Sosaku Yubiwa, resident artiste of the Pretty Boy Detective Club, had nothing to say. In order to express his reticence in writing, I’ve taken the liberty of inserting an ellipsis as you see above, but the truth is that he didn’t even give me─a year his senior─the courtesy of responding with silence.
He simply acted as if he hadn’t heard my question, and kept staring at his canvas without so much as batting an eyelash─while he rubbed it with a piece of burnt toast, as if to say even a crust of bread is too good for barbarians who don’t understand art.
What the hell is he doing with that toast, anyway? Feeding it to his painting?
At that point─perhaps because he couldn’t bear the pitiful sight of me getting the cold shoulder from a younger club member, or perhaps because he had intuited the thoughts of the young artiste, and where had he even been up till now, anyway─the leader of the Pretty Boy Detective Club popped out of seemingly nowhere with a laugh.
“Ha ha ha!”
As if he was laughing away my misery, or more likely, my foolishness.
“I myself shall give you a resplendent answer in Sosaku’s stead. Needless to say, as a scholar of beauty, I, too, have heard this children’s tale, but no such misgivings crossed my mind. And if the leader of a detective organization harbors no questions, then clearly no mystery is at hand. Obviously, some person of the church granted the boy and his dog their final wish─by secretly leaving the door unlocked.”
Aha.
Such a tidy─or should I say beautiful?─interpretation left no room for argument or doubt.
Though if the one giving the explanation hadn’t been our president, totally immune to logical argument as he is, I might well have stubbornly tried to argue the point. After all, if this person was motivated by kindness, then forget about leaving the door unlocked, surely they should have given the boy a crust of bread.
Then again, the man who painted Sunflowers would probably say that letting an aspiring artist see a painting is a far more charitable act than giving him some bread.
Perhaps dying in front of that painting had more value than living anywhere else.
It’s a pretty convincing argument, coming from Van Gogh.
Why? Because even if it’s unclear whether or not he really did spend two weeks in front of the Rembrandt he loved so much, the fact is that he shot himself sometime thereafter─which means that rather than ten years of his life, he gave his life itself.