Vincent Van Gogh's letter to Theo 1888

The Flowering Orchard, 1888 

 ...Even if it is some time before anyone comes here to stay with me, it won't make me change my mind about this step being urgent and being useful in the long run. This art that we are working in, we feel that it has a long future before it and one must be quietly settle, like steady people, and not like decadents. Here my life will become more an more like a Japanese painter's, living close to nature like a tradesman. And that, you well know is a less lugubrious affair than the decadent's way. If I can live long enough, I shall be something like old Tanguy. After all, we don't really know anything about our own personal future, but we nevertheless feel that impressionism will last...

... In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and sceptism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically. How will that come about, and what will we really find? It would be interesting to be able to prophesy, but it is even better to be able to feel that kind of foreshadowing, instead of seeing absolutely nothing in the future beyond the disasters that are all the same bound to strike the modern world and civilization like terrible lightning, through a revolution or a war, or the bankruptcy of worm-eaten states. If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. He studies a single blade of grass. 

But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole. 

Come now, isn't it almost a true religion which these Japanese teach us, who live in nature as though they themselves were flowers?