Vincent van Gogh Vase with Twelve Sunflowers painting

Vincent van Gogh Vase with Twelve Sunflowers paintingVincent van Gogh The Olive Trees paintingVincent van Gogh Still Life with Open Bible painting
object, but merely admires it from a position of utter detachment -- what I call the Innocent Imagination." My hero, I explained, was to be a Cosmic Amateur; a man enchanted with history, geography, nature, the people around him -- everything thatis the case -- because he saw its arbitrariness but couldn't understand or accept its finality. He would deal with reality like a book, a novel that he didn't write and wasn't a character in, but only an appreciative reader of; naturally he would assume that there were other novels, better ones and worse. . . But in truth, of course, hewasn't finally a spectator at all; he couldn't stay "out of it"; and the fiascos of his involvements with men and women -- in particular the revelation of his single mortal fate -- these things would make him at the end, if not an authentic person, at least an expert amateur, so to speak, who might aspire to a kind of honorary membership in the human fraternity.
"I think there's some heroism in that, don't you?" I was, in truth, never more enthusiastic about my story. Itwas a great conception after all, and