Van Gogh, The Starry Night: The Night the Stars Refused to Remain Still

Vincent van Gogh enters the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy while his spirit keeps running through the wheat fields outside, and he is given a room, a bed and a window smaller than his fear. Before dawn the hills, the sky and the morning star enter his mind and begin to turn, and he tells the canvas that painting only what he sees would be a lie: he lays down a blue of loneliness, a yellow that burns like a window, stars wrapped in rings of light, a sleeping village and a cypress that calls itself the staircase between the worlds. That night the Moon presides over the Court of Stillness inside the painting, with the stars as jury, and charges him with setting the sky in motion; Blue testifies that it is sorrow grown large enough to become architecture, and Yellow that darkness cannot swallow a point of light determined to remain. Asked whether painting saved him, Vincent says it gave his pain a form he could look at from outside himself, and he explains that he sends his canvases to his brother Theo because everyone needs a window that stays open. The verdict finds that he lied about the appearance of the sky and told the truth about its effect on the soul, and the book follows the painting beyond his death to the crowds in New York, ending with the stars telling Darkness that it is the wall that makes light visible.