Sometimes the mind is the smallest prison of all

[askygoneonfire]

 

 

“Now for the moment it seems things go very badly with me, and this has been so already for a considerable time, and it may continue so in the future for a while; but after everything seemed to go wrong, there will perhaps come a time when things will go right. I do not count on it, perhaps it will never happen, but in case there comes a change for the better, I would consider it so much gain, I would be contented, I would say; at last! you see there was something after all!….

And men are often prevented by circumstance from doing things, a prisoner in I do not know what horrible, horrible, most horrible cage. There is also, I know it, the deliverance, the tardy deliverance. A just or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, fatal circumstances, adversity, this is what makes men prisoners.

One cannot always tell what it is, that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but, however, one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks; “My God! is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity!” Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. But without this one remains in prison.”

 

Vincent Van Gogh - July 1880

(from The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for posting this. It reads like dozens of other posts that appear every day on The Icarus Project- some things never change, and I don't know if that's comforting or depressing.

I feel the opposite about the mind though (re your title). For me it is an open prison that stretches endlessly, like open water with no horizon.