He withdrew, to save his soul -- and his neck

Artist Paul Gauguin was born on this day in 1848.


"Fame! What a vain word, and what a vain recompense!" he wrote. "I think only of withdrawing myself far from men, and in consequence far from fame."

"Don't talk to me of Gauguin. I'd like to wring the fellow's neck!" -- Paul Cezanne.

Give an ear to this

Vincent Van Gogh was born on this day in 1853.

"I believe more and more," Van Gogh said, "that God must not be judged on this earth. It is one of his sketches that has turned out badly."

“Saint Augustine said that our hearts are restless because this is not our true home,” Sully told the assembled Great Books devotees, who were all present and accounted for.
“Where’s not our true home?” asked Robert. “The liberry?”

“No. he meant this earth.”  --  Chapter 27, The Misforgotten.

A head made of marble

The great sculptor Auguste Rodin (The Thinker) was born on this day in 1840.

"A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man."  --  Samuel Johnson.

   “No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library,” Sully read. Samuel Johnson. Sully had never cared much for Johnson, or for Boswell, that seventeenth-century equivalent of a jock-sniffer, and this observation, like so many of Johnson’s, seemed either slightly or totally off-kilter. A library was the vindication of human hopes, wasn’t it, their realization or elaboration crystallized in books? Indirectly, though, the great lexicographer had hit home with this sally, as almost everyone who worked here at the library, Sully fancied, could present a striking example, to one degree or another, of blasted hopes.   --  Chapter 21, The Misforgotten.