Looking at the stars always makes me dream…

 Light Installation by Lee Eunyeol

Vincent Van Gogh was sensitive, gifted and emotionally honest. Despite the mystery surrounding his death and the search for enchantment that fueled his life, there is no disagreement on his love and life-long devotion for the stars.

It is the stars as a final destination that I draw your attention to, taken from one of the most profoundly moving pieces on life, death, and the myriad thoughts on both.

The book, that is its source is by film critic, Roger Ebert, entitled Life Itself.  The excerpt, I Do Not Fear Death, is an eloquent and thoughtful piece that one can’t help but feel the need to capture and preserve. It is penned in loveliness and grace and the simple reading of it leaves you aching for a belief in divinity.

From the author’s wistful note that, “One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed 'the distinguished thing,'" to a favored passage on kindness he memorized, which reads in part, “I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals,” that Ebert says covers all his political beliefs, there is raw truth here in all its uneasiness.

Yet, it is the beautifully moving passage from Van Gogh that forms the heart of Ebert’s incandescent essay.

Looking at the stars

always makes me dream,

as simply as I dream

over the black dots

representing towns and villages

on a map.

Why, I ask myself,

shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky

be as accessible

as the black dots

on the map of France?

Just as we take a train

to get to Tarascon or Rouen,

we take death to reach a star.

We cannot get to a star

while we are alive

any more than we can

take the train

when we are dead.

So to me

it seems possible that

cholera, tuberculosis and cancer

are the

celestial means of locomotion.

Just as steamboats, buses and railways

are the terrestrial means.

To die

quietly of old age

would be to go there

on foot.

---