梵高 Part 02

The thoughts poured themselves out in a torrent of words.

Page after page, day after day.

All you have to do to find the real van Gogh, no fool at all, but a thoughtful, observant man, is to read his letters.

Hundreds of them, mostly written to his younger brother, Theo.

And you'll see that intelligence burning away.

My dear Theo, God, how beautiful Shakespeare is.

His language and his method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy.

So meet this other van Gogh, not a creature of blind instinct at all, but an insatiable bookworm.

I have made more or less a serious study of Victor Hugo and Dickens, and recently Aeschylus and a few of the great minor masters.

Okay, the scary one who'll buttonhole you in the pub and bang on and on about George Eliot and Charles Dickens, and you'll be backing off from the awful pong.