you see I can't accept your gift, and if I did, what would you think of me Would you still crave my company Would I crave yours?
I scarce heard these last words. I was staring at the painting, staring at these men who were indeed like angels. And a quiet anger had come over me, and I didn't want to linger there anymore. I had forsworn the assault, yet he had defended himself against me. No, I should not have come.
Spy on him, yes, but not linger. And once again, I moved swiftly to go.
He was furious with me for doing it. I heard his voice ring out in the great empty space.
Unfair of you to go like that! Positively rude of you to do it! Have you no honor What about manners if there is no honor left? And then he broke off, for I was nowhere near him, it was as if I'd vanished, and he was a man alone in the huge and cold museum speaking aloud to himself.
I was ashamed but too angry and bruised to go back to him, though why, I didn't know. What had I done to this being! How Marius would scold me for this.
I wandered about Amsterdam for hours, purloining some thick parchment writing paper of the kind I most like, and a fine-pointed pen of the automatic kind that spews black ink forever, and then I sought a noisy sinister little tavern in the old red-light district with its painted women and drugged vagabond youths, where I could work on a letter to David, unnoticed and undisturbed as long as I kept a mug of beer at my side.
I didn't know what I meant to write, from one sentence to the next, only that I had to tell him hi some way that I was sorry for my behavior, and that something had snapped in my soul when I beheld the men in the Rembrandt portrait, and so I wrote, in a hasty and driven fashion, this narrative of sorts.
You are right. It was despicable the way I left you. Worse, it was cowardly. I promise you that when we meet again, I shall let you say all you have to say.
I myself have this theory about Rembrandt. I have spent many hours studying his paintings everywhere-in Amsterdam, Chicago, New York, or wherever I find them-and I do believe as I told you that so many great souls could not have existed as Rembrandt's paintings would have us believe.
This is my theory, and please bear in mind when you read it that it accommodates all the elements involved. And this accommodation used to be the measure of the elegance of theories . . . before the word science came to mean what it means today.
I believe that Rembrandt sold his soul to the Devil when he was a young man. It was a simple bargain. The Devil promised to make Rembrandt the most famous painter of his time. The Devil sent hordes of mortals to Rembrandt for portraits. He gave wealth to Rembrandt, he gave him a charming house in Amsterdam, a wife and later a mistress, because he was sure he would have Rembrandt's soul in the end.
But Rembrandt had been changed by his encounter with the Devil. Having seen such undeniable evidence of evil, he found himself obsessed with the question What is good He searched the faces of his subjects for their inner divinity; and to his amazement he was able to see the spark of it in the most unworthy of men.
His skill was such-and please understand, he had got no skill from the Devil; the skill was his to begin with- that not only could he see that goodness, he could paint it; he could allow his knowledge of it, and his faith in it, to suffuse the whole.
With each portrait he understood the grace and goodness of mankind ever more deeply. He understood the capacity for compassion and for wisdom which resides in every soul. His skill increased as he continued; the flash of the infinite became ever more subtle; the person himself ever more particular; and more grand and serene and magnificent each work.
At last the faces Rembrandt painted were not flesh-and-blood faces at all. They were spiritual countenances, portraits of what lay within the body of the man or the woman; they were visions of what that person was at his or her finest hour, of what that person stood to become.