Van Gogh’s Early Years (from the archive)

An episode from 12/7/22: Tonight, we enter into the early years of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), from his birth in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands, to his time in the Borinage mining region of Belgium. It was there, at the age of twenty-seven—and after years of personal and professional failures—that he hit bottom … and suddenly realized he was an artist.

In the first half of the episode, I read from Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s biography, ⁠Van Gogh: The Life⁠. The second half is devoted to a handful of letters Van Gogh wrote to his brother in 1879 and 1880, where he admits the humiliation of his failures, and then revels in his newfound passion for drawing and painting. The letters can be ⁠found online here⁠.

You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

Human Voices Wake Us

Discover more from Tim Miller

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

#221: Volcanoes, Plagues & the Childhood of a Kabbalist – Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 3/16/26: Tonight, I read about the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the year 535 CE, and the outbreak of plague in Constantinople (and elsewhere) only a few years later. It all comes from Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade, and I give a handful of reasons why her histories for adults and children are definitely worth going to.Bookending these stories are a few passages in Gershom Scholem’s (1887-1982) memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memoirs of My Youth. It turns out that the great kabbalist liked sweets, and riding around on roller-skates.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

Van Gogh’s Early Years (from the archive)