wellmarch 💘

"Philosophy is a battle with the charm of our intelligence with the help of language." Wittgenstein

He is born in 1853, in a small Dutch village, Zundert, as the second Vincent in the same family, because the first, born a year earlier, is dead. And so it begins. With a name that had already been spoken for another. With a life that, from the very beginning, carries a shadow. Vincent van Gogh grows up in the house of a pastor, in a world where God is present, but not always a comfort, where words about meaning exist, but do not always reach the heart. From early on, there is tension between faith and doubt, between the desire to serve and the inability to belong. "I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process." This is not a confession, but a diagnosis, spoken too early. At the center of his life stands Theo van Gogh, the brother who does not simply love him, but sustains him, financially, emotionally, humanly. Their correspondence is not just an exchange of letters, but a space in which Van Gogh exists most clearly. There he thinks, suffers, believes, breaks, and gathers himself again. "What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?" He writes to him, and in that question there is more despair than hope. His sister Wil van Gogh is also part of this quiet network of ties, less intense, but no less real. The family is there, but always at the edge of understanding. They love him, but do not fully reach him. And he cannot be fully reached. Painting comes not as talent, but as necessity. Not as a choice, but as a form of salvation that is never complete. He does not paint the world as it is. He paints the world as he can endure it. Fields that burn. Skies that turn. Trees that do not grow, but struggle. "I dream my painting and I paint my dream." But his dream is not gentle. It is tense, almost painful, like consciousness itself. The women in his life are not refuge. His loves are uneven, unreturned, often tragic, from Ursula, who rejects him, to Sien Hoornik, with whom he tries to build something like a home, but which also collapses under the weight of his inner world. He does not know how to love calmly. He loves as he paints, to the end, to exhaustion, to impossibility. And everywhere, the question of God remains. Not the one that is preached, but the one searched for in suffering, in the earth, in simple people, in those who work, suffer, and remain silent. "There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." And despite everything, this remains his most radical gesture, to insist that love, even when it fails, even when it hurts, is a form of truth. His life does not settle. It does not resolve. It does not find rest. It moves toward its end as it began, with intensity, with excess of feeling, with an inability to remain within what the world calls normal. And yet, he remains. In colors that refuse obedience. In lines that tremble. In letters that still feel alive. "Normality is a paved road: it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it." And perhaps that is why he never walked on it. 🏵🌻🌼

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is one of the most powerful philosophical images in history, described in his work The Republic. It tells the story of prisoners chained inside a dark cave since birth. They face a wall, unable to turn their heads. Behind them burns a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners, objects pass by casting shadows on the wall. These shadows are the only reality the prisoners know. To them, the shadows are truth. One prisoner is freed. At first, the light blinds him. The real world confuses him. But slowly, he begins to understand that what he once saw were only illusions. He sees real objects, then the outside world, and finally the sun the source of all light and truth. When he returns to the cave to free the others, they reject him. They prefer the familiar shadows to the painful truth. The allegory represents the journey from ignorance to knowledge, from illusion to truth. The cave is the world of appearances. The shadows are false beliefs. The ascent is education and awakening. And the sun symbolizes ultimate truth what Plato called the Good. It is a reminder: most people live seeing shadows, while truth requires struggle, doubt, and the courage to step into the light.