Cafe Terrace

I stare. It has been my favorite painting and yet, this windy day during a Seattle summer, my ever-reverent heart is humbled at the first glimpse. The yellow of the lantern, so easily overlooked hanging above the Place du Forum, now strikes me, its texture almost hostile in its subtle intensity. The shutters, so forbidding in prints, serve only to keep light out, never noise. My fingers crawl toward the thatching of the roof, only to fall away at the stares of the other museum goers.
This, which I have poster-sized hanging with its brothers on my bedroom wall, seems so much smaller than my expectation and yet more spectacular and heart wrenching. The Café Terrace at Night, the English title affronts my senses as I quickly revert to French, Le Place du Forum a Nuit, more perfectly syllabic than its guttural English counterpart. Next to it is a Chair my grandmother studies carefully; spending hours more on a piece than I ever would, except his. I shake myself from the trance and race through the gallery finding boredom in modernism only to be caught again. In my haste, I have turned a circle and find myself caged lovingly in the arms of my inspiration.
My breath has been held fast for the years before this single painting hung facing me, trapped from the understanding of a man disturbed. So lonely, so quiet, and yet as I gaze half-worshiping this masterpiece, the common sounds of the streets come to me, chattering of people long dead. The cool French air bites my nose and I wrap my coat around me. The books, my art world catechism, never managed to make me cry.
Van Gogh volumes stand beside Dune and Thoreau, crowding the other art books into submission, wooing me with a name, "Vincent," to take comfort. Not in the optimistic reality of Vermeer or the fantastical Picasso who held me in my infancy but instead in the bleakly realistic subtlety of a distressed mind. The Cooper print I hold so dear, only serves to remind me of Casablanca and my father. I have never been one to relish Monet, whom my mother enjoys. The soft serenity plays a dim counterpoint to the onslaught of thoughts, about the progression of man, about my future, about everything that seems safely contained in Van Gogh's pieces. I needn't hear the thoughts of those milling in the painting, need not know why this evening in Arles was so beautiful. It is simply the passionate peace, content behind glass, which holds me fast.