CHAPTER 4

The Psychology of the Earth

Paul Cézanne

MARSEILLE WAS FOUNDED BY Greeks, Aix by Romans, “which explains everything,” said the guide at Les Lauves, the studio of Paul Cézanne, located just north of Aix-en-Provence. The “everything” that is thus explained was, I assumed, the contrast between the cheerful chaos and grime of Marseille and well-scrubbed, bourgeois Aix.

On a bright blue November day I’d taken lunch in one of the squares of Aix, after which I visited its fine tapestry museum, wandering among beautiful objects created by anonymous weavers who found meaning in refining the skills of their hands, in their daily encounter with learning from and shaping the material world, in pride in their unsigned work. Years later, a less enraptured friend tells me the weavers worked in terrible conditions that ruined their vision and that they contracted diseases from poisons in their dyes . . . and no doubt she was right, but their work was no more debilitating than assembling microchips, and they, at least, lived and died for beauty.

When I emerged from the tapestry museum the sky was a lowering sheet of gray, but I hiked up the road to Cézanne’s studio anyway, remembering my dictum: Never change your plans because of the weather, be Zen and go with the weather, let the weather reveal itself to you in all its variety and grandeur. Halfway to the studio I began to see little snowflakes, and by the time I arrived at Les Lauves, Cézanne’s studio, flurries were falling.

I strolled in the lovely, unkempt garden, then went inside, the only visitor, so the guides were chatty and told me how Cézanne used funds inherited on his mother’s death to hire an architect to design this big, nicely proportioned late nineteenth-century French residence, with a large painting studio incorporated into the second floor with a huge window to the north for indirect light and two smaller windows to the south so that he could have southern light when he wanted. In fact, the story of the house is more complicated, but in that particular moment I was content to listen to mellifluous French evoking Cézanne leaning on his contractor to get it done, get it done, he was sixty-three and had so much work he wanted to do. The house was finished in nine months. Four years later, in October of his sixty-seventh year, on one of his frequent expeditions to Mont Sainte-Victoire, though a cold autumn rain was falling, he continued painting (never change your plans because of the weather, be Zen and go with the weather). There he caught pneumonia; a few days later he died.

I gravitated to Cézanne the first time I set foot in a museum, eighteen years old, in France at a university overseas program not in order to learn French but to escape being drafted into the Vietnam War. I would require decades living in large cities before I understood why he drew me so powerfully. Like me, he was a country boy and a draft resister. Like another of my favorites, his fourteenth-century brother-in-painting Giotto, whose sculptural forms Cézanne’s figures evoke, Cézanne rooted his life and his work equally in faith and reason and saw no contradiction between them. I look at his paintings and understand that this is a man who grew up as I grew up—carrying the Virgin through the streets in May, swimming in the river in July, speaking a rough-hewn country idiom, probably told that he was “too smart for his own good,” hearing the old stories of gods and goddesses and saints and emerging from the classroom to search for them in the forests and fields and hills, because that was where their spirits lived and because, bluntly put, that was the whole of his world, the only world he knew. He would have to find the gods and goddesses and saints here or find them nowhere.

In Cézanne’s painting, the sacred becomes flesh and dwells among us. Long before contemporary quantum physics, Cézanne understood that all moments are present to this moment. (No, really, they are. Albert Einstein: “This distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, however tenacious.”) Gertrude Stein described the key to Cézanne’s revolution: the realization that “in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole”—an observation that also describes the philosophical and ecological revolution of the twentieth century, with Cézanne’s fractured landscapes among the forces that set it in motion. American and Western European thinkers began the twentieth century as specialists, teasing out each strand from the whole for intensive study. We ended it at the threshold of understanding that everything is interconnected; that there is no separation between any object or creature and its environment; that any separation does some violence to the phenomenon being studied; that there is no separation between self and other; that the universe is not linear, proceeding in a tidy chronological line from point A to point B, but a continuing process, an unending becoming. The novelist George Sand quoted Cézanne’s mentor, the painter and fellow solitary Eugène Delacroix, saying, “Neither the light that strikes this contour nor the shadow that glides lightly over it have a seizable stopping point”—that is, despite our illusions to the contrary, there is no border or boundary between the object and the light that strikes it, between the object and its surroundings, between now and past or future, between you and me, between us and the universe. In embracing this fact of the interconnectedness of all being, we are their students.

Cézanne began his artistic life as a poet and translator before shifting to painting, and was a voracious and discriminating reader—possibly the best-read painter of his day. Like almost all European artists of the time, he was deeply influenced by le japonisme, the flood of Asian art and philosophy that inundated Europe after Commodore Perry forcibly opened Tokyo harbor to the world in 1853. Asian art revealed to nineteenth-century European painters a vast new range of possibilities of the brush. The excitement and power of Cézanne’s painting arises from the coupling of the warm, earthy sensuality of his native Roman Catholicism, tinged in the south of France with heretic and pre-Roman, animist roots, with the precise, cool contemplation espoused by the Buddhist, Asian ideal of communion with nature.

Melancholics, among whom later in his life Cézanne counted himself, need less a particular friend, much less a spouse, than the presence of friendship as the foundation for their creativity. Here, too, the pattern of his life matches mine. Cézanne’s life was characterized by deep, intense friendships with men whom he left behind when the currents of life and work carried him elsewhere but who remained fully present and influential in his heart.

At thirteen he formed his most significant relationship with another person, equal in consequence to his marriage or his fatherhood and in passion second only to painting, when he befriended Émile Zola, who would later become one of France’s leading authors and social activists. They met when Zola moved from Paris with his parents to Provence, to Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne’s father was in the process of parlaying a prosperous hat business into a financial empire of sufficient consequence to provide his son an income that, however parsimoniously doled out, was sufficient to support his life of painting. The cities of Marseille and Aix brought Zola’s father from Paris to build a dam in the mountains above Aix. There he got entangled in the local bureaucracies, including a fight with the little village at the bottom of the creek which foresaw, accurately, that the big cities were robbing it of its water. By the time Zola père got the dam underway, he was ten years older; he died from pneumonia contracted while working on the site and never saw it completed. Today his dam has been rendered obsolete by a much larger dam. But the dam brought Zola the son and writer and Cézanne the painter together. That, of course, was its principal function in advancing the cause of beauty.

They were passionate friends, in love with each other totally and completely in their late teens/early twenties—Walt Whitman’s camerado love, the love of friends, the love of solitaries, the love about which I’m writing. Cézanne, the burlier of the pair, acted as Zola’s defender in the rough-and-tumble of the schoolyard. “We have entered each other’s body and soul,” Zola wrote of his friendship with Cézanne. Six years later Zola decamped to Paris. After two weeks’ silence, Cézanne begged for a letter from Zola, and later wrote him, “Ah! Yes, it would give me ineffable pleasure to see you . . . your mother told me that you would be coming to Aix . . . if I’d been a good jumper, I would have touched the ceiling, I leapt so high . . .” On hearing news of Cézanne’s arrival in Paris, Zola wrote to Baptistin Baille, third of their Provençal trio of friends, “I’ve seen Paul!!! I’ve seen Paul, do you understand the full melody of those three words?”

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, American solitaries with whom I will visit later, would have been entirely at home with the enthusiasm Cézanne and Zola shared. That such ecstatic friendship has fallen from our lives and art is due in part to our obsession with labels (gay, straight; married, single), and partly to our elevation of church-designed, government-sanctioned marriage as the apogee of human relationship. Somewhere, in part in service to capitalism, the notion took hold that to be worthy of celebration, love must be certified by government or church edict, when my experience has been that love does not submit itself to logic or reason, calendar or clock—that one may love differently, perhaps, but as intensely in a moment as across a lifetime. Ask any survivor of a war, or a plague.

It is that fact of selection—the intersection of chance and choice—that renders our friends dear, and the manner in which they literally personify the ever-changing currents of our lives. We must teach ourselves to value flux, but more than that, we must teach ourselves to value and attend to friends, not as way-stations between lovers or diversions from the real business of pairing up and marriage, but as relationships of first consequence in their own right.

Across from my parents’ house rose a steep, forested hill—Pine Knob, and though it rose only six or seven hundred feet above the river bottoms of the Rolling Fork, I imbued it with significance. Like New England’s Mount Monadnock for Thoreau and Emerson, like Mont Sainte-Victoire for Paul Cézanne, Pine Knob was emphatic in its declaration of solitude, a fixture of my literal and figurative landscapes—a manifestation of the “psychology of the earth,” a phrase that originated with Cézanne’s geologist friend Fortuné Marion.

I longed for Pine Knob to be more dramatic than it was. I wanted it to be a peak of the kind I’d seen in photographs, Mont Blanc or Mount Shasta, craggy and snow-covered and tall and above all majestic in its solitude, when in fact the charm of Pine Knob, I now realize, arose from the pleasing but entirely pastoral undulance it and the surrounding hills present to the eye. But for a child possessed of that volatile mix of ambition and imagination, a hillock may serve as Denali. The spirit works with what she has at hand.

And so in Aix, I took myself to the old man’s mountain, to Mont Sainte-Victoire, to hike to the dam designed by Zola’s father. My hike looped past an olive orchard and the ruins of a Roman aqueduct—that’s the south of France for you, you’re hiking in a wilderness and all of a sudden you come across an olive orchard and the ruins of a structure built two thousand years ago. Every once in a while, just often enough to lead one onward, the path gave spectacular views of the mountain, a living presence worthy of its lover’s genius.

Mont Sainte-Victoire presides with calm assurance over the rolling plain of central Provence. With my first head-on view of its shimmering, weather-sculptured self, I understood that it was Cézanne’s great and lifelong love, more than his wife and son, more even than his friends, and for good reason. To the north, the mountain descends in a long gentle slope, covered in oak and pine, with rosemary as the dominant undergrowth shrub—the scent alone was worth the minimal effort of the walk. To the south, the mountain descends sharply, a great white limestone mass, more than a thousand feet steep. Geologists tell us that 300 million years or so ago, the layers of a more ancient seabed were lifted and then, over time, folded forward, toppling over, or so I fantasize, under their own weight, in the way of some elaborate, layered French pastry. The lip of this great fold, thus exposed, eroded over time to make the mountain that I hike today. As a result of its orientation, the south face of the mountain is constantly in motion, as the near-constant Mediterranean sun passes across its face, so that shadow and light interplay over its gashes and crevices and canyons.

It must have been this particular feature—the mountain’s capture and incarnation of light—that endeared it so to Cézanne; that, and its human scale (it reaches just over 3,000 feet, nearly the same height as Mount Monadnock), and maybe its manifestly feminine presence. The obvious visual evocation is of a breast, but rather than that I mean how in its splendid solitude it emanates warmth and embrace over the whole of its setting. Cubism waiting to be seen by an artist who could occupy beginner’s mind thoroughly enough to see it and had the skill to execute what he saw, it is the embodiment of energy and mass, flux and permanence, life and death.

And then on cue, at the precise correct moment, an angel appeared on the trail, a young man with a head of dark curls who stepped out of a Botticelli painting, his cheeks flushed from exertion and his bare chest nicely displayed by the straps of his daypack. I smiled and mumbled, “Bonjour,” and he smiled and said, “Bonjour,” and I was left wondering if he was an apparition. School was in session that day, there was no reason a young man would be up on the mountain, and yet there he was. I turned to look back at him, but he continued down the long incline as I kept looking and looking, and then, at the very bottom, too far away for me to read any body language, he turned around and looked back at me, raised his hand in a half-wave, and continued around the bend.

Like he on

that last hill which lets him see his valley

in wholeness, one last time, will turn and halt and pause,

that way we live, forever taking leave.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegy #8”

That bonjour, that magical apparition, that farewell wave, would not have contained its frisson, its certainty that somewhere, in some past or future or parallel and contiguous life, he and I were both seventeen years old in a world that would allow us to step into Cézanne’s landscape hand in hand—none of that would have come to pass except that we, this young hiker and I, were each and both alone.

After several years Cézanne followed Zola to Paris, but he was too much a son of the country to be comfortable for long on city pavements. In 1869 he established what would become a lifelong relationship with Marie-Hortense Fiquet, with whom he had a son, Paul, to whom he was devoted. But neither he nor Hortense was well suited to domestic life, a fact exacerbated by Cézanne’s concealing their stormy relationship from his father for seventeen years from fear that the elder would not approve the match and might terminate his allowance. Or such is the reason offered by his biographers; my sensitive bachelor’s nose senses another solitary who understood that he was “not the marrying kind.” After years in which they lived apart more often than together, the couple married in 1886, in part to assure Paul’s paternity, though they had long since arrived at an agreement by which Hortense and their son lived in Paris and Cézanne lived elsewhere, devoting himself to painting, his true and lifelong lover.

Theirs is hardly the first marriage whose success required that the spouses live largely apart. Cézanne had an intense relationship with Hortense, but she was financially profligate, a burden in those years in which Cézanne was dependent on his father’s beneficence, and she was as dismissive of her husband’s painting as Zola had been supportive. Near the end of Cézanne’s life she burned his mother’s belongings and papers, an act that sent him howling into the woods in grief. For emotional support and sustenance he turned to friends, and, increasingly as he aged, to his painting—which is to say, to Mont Sainte-Victoire, the serene embodiment of his solitude. He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire over a hundred times, compared to some twenty-five paintings of Hortense—numbers in which I read, a little fancifully, the relative measure of his affection.

Critics and biographers have often presented Cézanne as breaking off his friendship with Zola after the publication of L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece), Zola’s portrait of a failed painter who commits suicide. But the recent major biography by the perceptive Alex Danchev minimizes this split in favor of the greater likelihood that, with age, Cézanne grew deeper into his particular character—solitary and contemplative—while Zola became an ever more public figure (though he, too, despite his marriage and many affairs, defined himself as a solitary). With his friendships, Cézanne was the platonic equivalent of the serial monogamist. By 1866 he had bonded with the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro as his painting companion, correspondent, and source of emotional sustenance. Danchev is correct, I think, in perceiving Cézanne as not severing his friendship with Zola but as moving on—evolving. For many years he and Zola remained in touch but drifted ever farther apart, as Cézanne grew more conservative and Zola pursued his commitment to social justice.

Among the most remarkable of Cézanne’s friendships was that with the pauper, poet, pianist, and philosopher Ernest Cabaner, whom he met—so the story goes—when Cabaner stopped him to ask to see the painting under his arm: Bathers at Rest, now housed in Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation collection. When Cabaner admired it, Cézanne gave it to him. It hung over the bed in the hovel of a room where already Cabaner was dying of tuberculosis. As evidence that Cézanne took the responsibilities of friendship seriously, in 1888, not long before Cabaner died, Cézanne organized a benefit for his expenses, with paintings donated by Dégas, Manet, Pissarro, and Cézanne himself, and a catalogue introduction by Zola.

In his late years, Cézanne was not entirely a hermit; he walked into town on Sunday afternoons to attend mass and dine with his wife and son before walking back to his studio, in the words of Rilke “a queer old lone wolf” who was in his last years “old and shabby and children followed him every day on his way to the studio, throwing stones at him as if he were a stray dog.” All the same, Cézanne chose the discipline of long hours spent painting in solitude, lengthening those hours as he came closer to the great mystery, the great transition to that other form of life called death.

A facile explanation of those years would see in him an old man whose untreated diabetes (insulin would not be discovered for many years) drove him to the edge of madness, but artists and art are not in the business of facile explanations. Cézanne sought the sacred through his work, which he understood in religious terms; he accepted entirely the concept of a vocation to which he had been called. He writes of “being in front of the landscape and drawing religion from it.”

Cézanne returned to Roman Catholicism in 1890, at the beginning of the intense final period of his life, and there is an emphatic connection between his return to the Roman church, his retreat into solitude, and his obsession with painting that geologic loner, Mont Sainte-Victoire. Working at the edge of diabetic collapse and with ravaged eyes, Cézanne paints, over and over, hallucinogenic visions of the “holy mountain of victory.” Looking at these paintings, I’m given to consider how much modern art owes itself to religion and high blood sugar.

Cézanne was much taken with the medieval conception of character, which described four personality types corresponding to the body’s four humors: short-tempered (choleric), optimistic (sanguine), easy-going (phlegmatic), and introspective (melancholic). For many years he named himself a choleric—the fiery blood of the south manifesting in the passionate painter—but as he aged he changed his self-characterization to melancholic. What distinguishes the melancholic, the French novelist Stendhal emphasized, is the search for solitude. Immersed in our society’s fear and demonization of loneliness, the contemporary melancholic may spend years figuring out that she or he is temperamentally inclined to prefer living alone over the hypocrisies and accommodations and polite twaddle of society.

“Love is always a serious matter for the melancholic,” Cézanne wrote. His statement struck me as explaining solitaries to ourselves as well as to any lover who might have the challenge and luck to stumble into relationship with us. How seductive and yet how dangerous, to love someone who brings such passion to one’s life! Little wonder his marriage was so stormy.

Cézanne’s fellow painter Jean Renoir described Cézanne at his easel: “an unforgettable sight . . . Cézanne . . . painting, looking at the countryside: he was truly alone in the world, ardent, focused, alert, respectful, sometimes coming away disappointed, returning without his canvas, which he’d leave on a rock or on the grass, at the mercy of the wind or the rain or the environment.” Truly alone in the world, ardent, focused, alert, respectful: I know no better description of the virtues of solitude. Of these, “ardent” and “respectful” may be achieved in the company of another, but they take on different characters altogether when they manifest themselves in solitude, where of necessity the world, and not another individual, becomes the focus of one’s ardent and respectful heart. But “focused” and “alert”? Remarkable indeed is the companion who will preserve silence long enough for these qualities to manifest themselves in tandem. “Only solitude, and the safety of solitude, permits of undertaking and achieving,” wrote Cézanne’s aesthetic mentor Delacroix.

Working in silence, I try to do each task, from stir-fry to writing, as silently as possible—no radio or television or speakerphone—a consummately pleasant exercise to see how quietly I can work, how completely I may cultivate a light hand. Everything is improved in the process, including the task, its doing, and its outcome.

The painter’s task—the writer’s task—the composer’s task—the gardener’s task—the cook’s task—the teacher’s task—the meditator’s task—the solitary’s task is to get out of the way, to dissolve and efface the self into the work at hand so as to permit its subject’s essence to shine forth. Cézanne wrote, “You don’t paint souls. You paint bodies; and when the bodies are well-painted, dammit, the soul—if they have one—the soul shines through all over the place.”

In our age, which, like Cézanne’s Belle Epoque, idolizes self-indulgence and self-expression, Cézanne teaches the power of restraint. From Cézanne, Rilke writes, we learn that “the very best—love—stays outside the work. Sentimentalists paint ‘I love this here,’ instead of painting ‘here it is.’ . . . [Cézanne] would certainly not have shown another human being his love . . . thanks to his strangeness and insularity, he turned to nature and knew how to swallow back his love for every apple and put it to rest in the painted apple forever.” The paintings are the expression of what he sees, of the world in front of him, of his love of what is. Through his art the viewer becomes one with the painted object, whether with the apple or Mont Sainte-Victoire. His paintings can thus restore viewers to our true selves, without judgment or interpretation. In them the viewer becomes one with the universe, no duality, no separation between self and other, past and future and the eternal now.

Cézanne understood that every successful painting had to express the unity of all creation; it had to be so precise in its particularity, so thoroughly seen, that it became a stand-in for everything that is. “People think a sugar bowl has no physiognomy, no soul,” he wrote. “But that changes every day, too. [As with people], you have to know how to take them, how to coax them, those fellows.” I can say he’s crazy—perceiving a soul in a sugar bowl?—or I can listen to what he’s telling me, in his letters and in his work, which is that the sacred exists in every particle and atom, the sacred is what is, and my job is to pay sufficient attention so that I too can perceive the psychology of the earth—its living, feeling, expressive self, made manifest in rivers and seas and mountains and tornadoes and earthquakes.

In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky, a radical in his own right in his use of color, wrote that “Cézanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate. He painted these things as he painted human beings, because he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything. . . . A man, a tree, an apple, all were used by Cézanne in the creation of something that is called a ‘picture,’ and which is a piece of true inward and artistic harmony.”

The artist or writer does not impose harmony on reality but—with sufficient reverence and diligence and selflessness and solitude—uncovers the harmony that is always there but that we conceal from ourselves out of a preference for material comfort and fear of the consequences a full and unreserved embrace of harmony requires. This faith in the underlying harmony roots itself in a love of and appreciation for nature, because nature, no matter how extreme the human abuse heaped on her, embodies a quiet, continual knitting and healing of life, ever dependent on death to make herself anew. “Art is a harmony parallel to nature,” Cézanne wrote—not identical with but parallel to nature. Art of any kind, undertaken with attention and focus and as part of a commitment to discipline, is an effort at reenactment of the original creative gesture—the precipitation of the universe at the moment of its creation. That, I believe, is why we sing, paint, dance, sculpt, write; that is why any one of us sets out to create something from nothing, and why the creative impulse is essentially religious or, if you prefer, spiritual. We seek to recreate the original creative gesture, whatever or whoever set it in motion—the bringing into being of what is. We seek the center of beauty.

Once in his hermitage at Les Lauves, Cézanne had to install mesh on the windows, because the neighborhood children threw rocks at the home of the crazy solitary painter (van Gogh suffered a similar indignity, tortured by the children of Auvers-sur-Oise) who loved his solitude, who loved and respected himself enough to endure the trials of solitude, because only in solitude could he best give himself to his painting and through his painting to his God—and through his God to us. I know those rock-throwing children; I was once among them, on a winter evening when I was fifteen and riding around with the guys and somebody proposed that we throw rocks at the home of a man whose crime was that he lived alone in rural Kentucky. Of course there was some hidden, unvoiced homophobia, though at this time, deep in the country in the late 1960s, sex between men was barely known and spoken of only in epithets barely comprehended by their speaker. I write with great relief that I did not pick up a stone; I did not walk up to the house and throw rocks but hung back at the car, feeling acutely my solitude in doing the right thing. But neither did I object, though I knew what we were doing was wrong.

It is a good question, whether witnessing evil in silence is as evil as the evil itself.

And I knew as well, even then—a vividly remembered gnawing in my groin—that I shared something with that man in the house, that I might someday be not outside but inside, like Cézanne in Les Lauves, listening to the rocks smack the walls.

No greater crime than solitude.

That is a story from my solitude, but it is not uniquely mine. On the contrary, in learning to live with the always present threat of violence, literal or implied, I have been given access to the place where so many people, women and small or feminine men, live all the time. All women or feminine men who have found themselves alone on a city street know this place. We have learned our lessons from the history of violence. At least once weekly I encounter that lesson acted out: I, a tall man, will be walking on a deserted city street when a woman turns the corner; seeing me, she crosses to the other side. I feel at the same time robbed of the companionable nod, the unjustness of her judgment, and the street-smart wisdom of her choice.

In 1898, Zola published his famous open letter “J’accuse . . . !,” in which he set forth the case for anti-Semitism as the motivation behind the prosecution of Albert Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish descent who had been convicted of treason. Anti-Semitic painters, among them Renoir and Dégas, aligned themselves with conservative Roman Catholics against Dreyfus; those in his support were liberal thinkers and social justice activists, among them Pissarro, Monet, and Mary Cassatt, with Zola as their champion. Facing imprisonment and death threats, Zola fled to England. After a year he returned to Paris, where he died in 1902 under suspicious circumstances now widely considered to have been a politically motivated murder. The Dreyfus Affair divided France into bitterly antagonistic camps and may have marked the definitive end of Zola’s friendship with Cézanne, who did not actively engage the controversy but who was by this time a devoutly practicing Catholic.

“I am only fit for isolation,” Cézanne wrote, an observation born in part from the wild mood swings induced by his untreated diabetes. But throughout his life Cézanne had been known for his inquiétude, his restlessness or—a better translation—his anxiety. At a different moment he wrote to Émile Bernard, that gadfly among the great painters of France, “I can’t bear for anyone to touch me; it goes back a long ways.”

In his last years, Cézanne was treated shabbily by his brother-in-law, and in keeping with the loyalty that the marriage contract requires even in the presence of wrongdoing, his sister collaborated with her husband’s perfidy. With the deaths of colleagues and friends (Zola, Pissarro, Cabaner, the dwarf painter Achille Empéraire), and the growing awareness of his own mortality, Cézanne grew ever more obsessed with his work—to his life project of remaking how we encounter the world. As Danchev writes, “For want of men there were trees,” a sentiment I recommend to all solitaries. Cézanne painted trees, often. He built a wall around an olive tree outside his house so that it would not be damaged during construction, and in the evenings he embraced and spoke to it—like William Blake, another married solitary who talked to trees.

With Cézanne as his inspiration, Rilke writes, “All we have to do is to be, but simply, earnestly, the way the earth simply is.” Rilke knows that for most of us, nothing could be more difficult. We live in our heads, we live for the future, we live for retirement. This is a challenge for those influenced by Western traditions—Jews and Christians and Muslims: all that living for a presumed messiah to come, or to return, or for a future day of judgment; all that longing for salvation when in fact paradise is right at hand (“the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” Matthew 10:7), and our greatest troubles arise from not understanding that this is so. Paradise is in Cézanne’s basket of fruit. Paradise is in the vase and pitcher on the table. Paradise, wrote the solitary and mystic Rumi, is a mirror in which you see yourself. In his paintings Cézanne hands us the mirror.

On my visit to Cézanne’s studio in Les Lauves, I listened to the guide rattle on, a long story involving the olive trees that she claimed Cézanne preserved (Danchev writes that the original trees died in the great frost of 1956). I lost track of her French because I looked out the big north-facing window and a blizzard was blowing. Snow was swirling from the sky—big, fat, wet flakes of the kind that precipitate when the temperature is at freezing, covering all the pines and figs and olive and plane trees. I was enchanted; I lost my capacity to listen or speak French; I lost my capacity to speak at all in the swirl of cadmium white.

The guide withdrew to attend to some business, leaving me alone. I had the studio to myself and I was alone as Cézanne had painted alone, alone with the falling snow and the diffuse gray early winter light and the living presence of the old man, the painter, his easel and brush and palette and tea set and mugs and wall crucifix and human skull precisely where they were placed on the day of his death.

On my later, longer visit to Aix, on warm afternoons I walked past Les Lauves to the Terrain des Peintres, the flat ledge of land, now a small park, from which Cézanne often painted Mont Sainte-Victoire. Painters still work here, sometimes testing the colors of their palettes against the rock outcroppings or on the flagstone path, leaving a spoor of bright dabs of primary colors. The winter light, the flat northern light of Europe, so far north of Kentucky or San Francisco or Tucson, the light diffused in its long horizontal journey through moisture and dust, illuminates the mountain’s flesh and bone, forest and stone. In this magical evening northern light, even human frailty and cruelty and suffering take their place in the solitude that draws us on, to the place where we are going.

Inscribed on a plaque at the park’s edge:

Look at this Sainte Victoire! What élan, what imperious thirst for the light, and yet what melancholy, when evening restores its gravity. She breathes all blues from the air . . .

Paul Cézanne