The Empty Canvas Read Free Page B

'of course', because I ought to have foreseen that boredom would not disappear simply owing to my moving house: in any case I was rich not because I lived in the Via Appia, but because I possessed a certain amount of money. The fact that I did not want to make use of it mattered, fundamentally, very little; there are rich people who are miserly and who spend a very small part of their income and live poorly, but no one, on that account, would think of calling them poor. And so my first idea, or rather my first obsession, that my boredom and consequent artistic sterility were due to the fact of living with my mother came gradually to be replaced by a second and more serious obsession: that it was impossible to renounce one's own wealth; being rich was like having blue eyes or an aquiline nose; a subtle compulsion bound the rich man to his money, and gave the colour of money even to his decision not to make use of it. In short, I was not a poor man who had been rich, I was simply a rich man who was pretending, both to himself and to others, to be poor.
    I went on to prove to myself that this was true, in the following way: What does a really poor man do, if he hasn't any money? He dies of hunger. What would I do in such a case? I should go and seek help from my mother. And even if I did not do so, I should not on that account be considered poor: not at all, I should merely be considered mad. But, I immediately reflected, mine was not an extreme case. It was an intermediate case, since it was true that I allowed myself to be supported by my mother, even though I limited such support to what was strictly necessary. Thus, in comparison with the really poor, I found myself in the privileged, treacherous position of the rich gambler in relation to the poor gambler: the former can lose to an unlimited extent, the latter cannot. But—even more important—the former can really 'play', that is, amuse himself; whereas the latter can only set out to win.
    It is difficult to say what my feelings were as I thought over these things. There was a sense of some kind of petty witchcraft, against which I could do nothing, because it was impossible for me to tell when or how or where the spell which enmeshed me had been woven. Sometimes I thought of the saying in the Gospels: 'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God'; and I wondered what being rich meant. Was one rich because one possessed a lot of money? Or because one had been born into a rich family? Or because one had lived, and still lived, in a society that placed riches above all other good things? Or because one believed in riches, desiring to become rich or bewailing the fact that one had been rich? Or because—as in my case—one did not want to be rich? The more I thought about it, the more difficult did it seem to me to define precisely, in my own mind, the feeling of compulsion, of predestination, that wealth aroused in me. Of course this feeling would not have existed if I had succeeded in freeing myself from my initial obsession that my boredom resulted from wealth, and my artistic sterility from boredom. But all our reflections, even the most rational, originate in some obscure basis of feeling. And it is not so easy to free oneself of feelings as it is of ideas: the latter come and go, but feelings remain.
    It may be objected, at this point, that, when all was said and done, I was nothing more than an unsuccessful painter who—which is perhaps unusual—was conscious of his own failure: and that was all there was to it. Quite right; but up to a certain point only. Certainly I had failed, but not because I was unable to paint pictures that other people liked; it was rather because I felt that my pictures did not permit me to express myself, in other words to deceive myself into imagining that I had some contact with external things—that is, in a word, they did not prevent me from being bored. Now the