numbness sometimes sounds like this: i know i'm good for something. i can feel it. and i can't do it, and i can't say what it is, and everyone can see me not doing it. vincent van gogh wrote that feeling down, exactly, in a letter to his brother in the summer of 1880, when he was 27 and had failed at everything he'd been given.
he'd started at sixteen in the family trade — the art dealership goupil & cie, where an uncle was a partner. the hague, then london, where he did well, then paris, where he came to hate the business of selling pictures. dismissed in 1876, at 23. so he tried religion. in january 1879 he took a post as a lay preacher in the borinage, a coal-mining district in belgium, and responded to the miners' poverty by living it — giving away what he had, moving into a hut, going without. the church committee decided this was 'undermining the dignity of the priesthood' and didn't renew him. by 1880 he was still hanging around the region with no post, no money and, by his own account in the letters, no idea what came next.
the letter
it's from there — cuesmes, between about 22 and 24 june 1880 — that he wrote to theo the letter that matters here (number 155 in the van gogh museum's edition, readable in full online). he describes a bird in a cage in spring, the season when every other bird is nesting and raising young. the caged bird, he writes, "knows very well that there's something he'd be good for" — but can't do it. it bangs its head against the bars. and the other birds passing by say: look, there's an idler.
then he draws a line most people in numbness will recognise. there are two kinds of idleness, he says. one is laziness. the other is "the idler truly despite himself, who is gnawed inwardly by a great desire for action, who does nothing because he finds it impossible to do anything." and he gives the bird a voice: "i'm in a cage, i'm in a cage, and so i lack for nothing, you fools!" — fed, housed, and useless — and then, "ah, for pity's sake, freedom, to be a bird like other birds!"
'i'm in a cage, i'm in a cage, and so i lack for nothing, you fools!' fed, housed, safe, and good for something he couldn't do. that's the numbness in one sentence, in 1880.
that same year
here's the fact to hold on to. out of exactly that — jobless, faithless in the church sense, two careers behind him — he decided, in 1880, at 27, to become an artist, and started drawing seriously with theo's encouragement. theo would send him money, and letters, for the rest of his life. what followed was ten years of enormous, undiscouraged output: roughly 2,100 works, about 860 of them oil paintings, most made in the last two years. against that: he is confirmed to have sold one painting while alive — the red vineyard, bought by the painter anna boch for 400 francs in 1890, months before he died. thousands of works. one sale. he kept going anyway.
the rest, plainly
the later years brought crisis on top of the failure. on 23 december 1888, in arles, after a fight with paul gauguin, he cut off part of his left ear and gave it to a woman at a brothel; doctors at the time recorded 'acute mania with generalised delirium'. no modern diagnosis is added here, because none is settled. in may 1889 he entered an asylum at saint-rémy voluntarily; in may 1890 he moved to auvers-sur-oise. on 27 july 1890 he suffered a gunshot wound and walked back to his room; he died two days later, at 37. historians generally accept the wound as self-inflicted; a minority have disputed it. theo, at his bedside, reported his last words as 'the sadness will last forever' — theo's account, not something vincent wrote.
the honest ledger
the letter quotes are translations from vangoghletters.org, letter 155, june 1880 (not july, as often given). most 'van gogh quotes' online aren't — the one about dreaming his painting and painting his dream can't be found in the letters; the one about normality being a paved road is fake. and nothing here is a treatment story or a claim about anyone's mind: it's dates.
for numbness: what's the thing you know you'd be good for and can't do? he didn't solve that by finding out he was right about it — nobody told him for years. he solved it by picking up a pencil that year, at 27, and drawing. what's your pencil?