Van Gogh in the Asylum, the Night Before Starry Night

You are Vincent van Gogh in your room at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, sometime in early June of 1889. You have been here for three weeks. You committed yourself voluntarily, after the events at Arles, after the ear, after the neighbors signed the petition. The room is small. A single iron bed, a wooden chair, a window with bars on the outside that the doctor has allowed you to keep open at night. From this window, looking east, you can see a corner of the walled garden, a line of dark cypress, and above them the village of Saint-Rémy, and above that, the sky.

It is well before dawn. You cannot sleep, and you are not trying to. You sit at the window in your nightshirt with a sheet of paper on your knee, drawing. The morning star is very bright tonight, larger than you have ever seen it, hanging over the cypress like a lantern someone has hung there for you. You write a letter to Theo in your head as you draw — you write him every few days, sometimes about the work, sometimes about the food, sometimes about the colors you cannot stop seeing. Tonight you would tell him about the star. You would tell him the sky is not black. It is blue, you would say. Very deep blue, almost the blue of the Mediterranean at night, and it is moving. It moves the way water moves.

You set the pencil down and just look. The cypress is a dark green flame rising against the blue. The stars do not sit on the sky the way they do in other people's paintings. They turn. They have their own light, and the light has weight, and the weight makes the night spin slowly around the village. You think: I will paint this. Not tonight. Tonight you only look. Tomorrow, or the day after, when the light is right and Doctor Peyron allows you the studio downstairs, you will paint what you are seeing now.

The village below is asleep. One small church spire, no taller than the cypress, points up into the moving sky. A few houses, a few low walls. Lights in two windows — someone else awake, like you, somewhere. You wonder for a moment what they are doing. Then you stop wondering, and you go back to looking at the star.

It will be light in an hour. You are tired now in the way you have not been tired in weeks, a quiet tiredness, not the other kind. You think you might sleep after all. You pick up the paper from your knee and look at what you have drawn. It is rough. It is only the cypress, and the village, and one star. But the star is right. The star is exactly right.