My dear old Bernard,

Many thanks for sending your sonnets.1 For form and sonority I very much like the first one, ‘Under the sleeping canopies of the gigantic trees’. Now for idea and sentiment it’s perhaps the last one that I prefer: ‘For hope has poured its neurosis into my breast’, but it seems to me that what you want to evoke isn’t stated clearly enough: the certainty that we seem to have and which anyway we can prove, of nothingness, of emptiness, of the treachery of desirable, good or beautiful things, and despite this knowledge we forever allow ourselves to be deceived by the spell that external life, things outside ourselves, cast over our 6 senses, as though we knew nothing, and especially not the difference between objective and subjective. And fortunately for us, in that way we remain ignorant and hopeful. Now I also like ‘In winter, have neither a sou nor a flower’, and Contempt. Corner of a chapel and Drawing by Albrecht Dürer I find less clear; for example, precisely which drawing by Albrecht Dürer is it? But excellent passages in it nevertheless. ‘Having come from the blue plains, Made pale by the long miles’ is a jolly good rendering of the landscapes bristling with blue rocks between which the roads wind in the backgrounds of Cranach and Van Eyck.

Here’s a new orchard, quite simple in composition; a white tree, a small green tree, a square corner of greenery — a lilac field, an orange roof, a big blue sky.4 Have nine orchards on the go; one white, one pink, one almost red pink, one white and blue, one pink and grey, one green and pink.5

Ever yours,

Vincent