December 8, 1953 - Comparison

There is a boy at the library who delivers our mail. He is a philosophy student & is living what he himself calls the bohemian life. He wears his hair uncut & uncombed, his cloths are never clean nor pressed, he is often unshaven & he smokes continuously. Yet he has fine features combined to make a handsome face. He is basically shy and self conscious and highly nervous. He likes to talk to me; I imagine, because I appear interested in what he tries to tell me & yet I must here confess much of what he says I cannot understand. He talks in terms I do not know, of ideas, methods, types, theories, that mean nothing to me. I listen intently, trying to make some similar pattern out of the words he speaks. I think I am being too unjust but it is a strange feeling I have when he talks & I cannot converse intelligently because I do not know what words to use!

The purpose of all this is the comparison that rings in my mind between this boy & Vincent van Gogh. My thought on it is this: since reading Lust For Life I have felt as I wrote previously that I would have wanted to & would have been able to understand V.v.G. & his abilities & would have been one to share his life & offer him some happiness. Now being candid I see this is all very foolish & is merely hindsight. He was lacking in friends because of his coarseness, his uncleanness, his unconventional habits etc. I like to think I would have been different but I must realize I would have been no different. I know this because in the case of J. I find him interesting but yet his untidiness, his disregard for the usual niceties, & his moodiness often disgust me. So you see after all, I am no better than the crowd, no matter how much I might want to be.