The Starry Night: The Sky That Turns Within Me

Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, painted in Saint-Rémy amid isolation and pain, speaks here in its own voice: it is the sky within the viewer, turning as the heavens turn, and it asks the darkness to plant its light. The book moves through the painting part by part, from the spirals where stars become wide-open eyes and voices of light, to the sleeping village whose windows guard a dreaming child, a waiting woman and a man who cannot sleep, and to the cypress, a finger of fire rising from the earth toward infinity. The painting calls itself a prayer in oil and color and a scream that learned how to become beautiful, and holds that darkness is sometimes the only place where we can see the stars. Van Gogh stands before the night with only a brush and a burdened heart, and his pain enters the blue, passes through the yellow and emerges as a star, because art gives the wound a language. The book ends by asking who is looking at whom, and with a star telling the reader to raise his head and look, since the light may be closer than he thinks.