The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (24 page)

Bring into your mind’s eye for a moment the most complicated sky you have ever seen. Perhaps you happened once over a ridge while hiking in the Vermont woods and came upon a strange show of orange and blue in the western sky. You and your buddy stopped in your tracks. Or maybe you came around a bend while driving out of the Pyrenees south into Spain, and you had to catch your breath upon the first sight of the endless pink mottled sky over the plain of Castile.

Now imagine that your deepest longing—your vocation—is to paint that sky. Imagine that you are so captivated by the play of nature and light that you must capture it in your net of paints and brushes—render its mystery palpable on the plain white canvas. It is no small task. How will you do it?

Such was the experience—and the dilemma—of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a French painter of the mid-nineteenth century who became, over the course of a long career, one of the greatest landscape painters of all time.

Some of us perhaps flirted briefly with Camille Corot in that one required course on the history of Western art that we took in school. We then forgot him. It’s easy to do. Corot did not live a dramatic life. There were no sexual scandals or flamboyant mistresses. There were no screaming fights or flaming rivalries with other artists. Only the long life of a dedicated craftsman.

Corot did not seek fame. In fact, he was remarkably immune to it. He once said that he hoped his paintings would be celebrated but that he would be forgotten. Corot lived for his work. He was a kind of artist-monk. He never married. In fact, he declared early that his life would be dedicated to art, and there would be little room for wives or mistresses.

Corot was an artist’s artist. Other painters of the time adored him, watched him closely, learned from him. They also copied him brazenly—and sometimes they privately hated him. In 1897, when Claude Monet was nearly sixty, he was viewing a retrospective of Impressionist paintings, including canvases by Corot. The well-known art critic Raymond Koechlin was at Monet’s side, and declared aloud how wonderful it was to have “
so many great works of art gathered together.” Monet replied, “
There is only one master here—Corot. Compared to him, the rest of us are nothing.” Then he added, “
This is the saddest day of my life.”

When I accidentally stumbled into an exposition of Corot’s work at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1996, I had entirely forgotten who the man was. I had found my way into an exposition called
In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting
. It traced the development of the European school of open-air landscape painting of which Corot was a granddaddy. There were quite a few canvases by The Master. They took my breath away.

How had I missed the genius of this giant of Western art? Why hadn’t pictures of his fantastic work drawn me to him before? Well, these were the kinds of paintings whose power could only be hinted at in photographs. In India it is claimed that certain adept yogis cannot be photographed. The power of their body’s energy is too subtle. So, too, apparently, Corot’s canvases. Seen live, they pulsed with a subtle inner light.

These paintings were not “about” anything. They were not “representations” of nature. They were not copies of nature. They were, as Thoreau would have said, “the thing itself.” (Emerson exhorted Thoreau to let his work so live and breathe that every sentence would be its own evidence!) Frost said of his poems: “
They are an idea of an idea of an idea.” Corot’s paintings, likewise, were an idea of an idea of an idea: Condensed. Coiled. Alive.

2

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796 into a family of genteel merchants. His mother ran one of the most elegant dressmaking salons in the Rue du Bac—a fashionable district of the French capital. His father ran the business side of the salon, and hoped—not unreasonably, one imagines—that his only son, Camille, would eventually join him in the family venture.

This was not to be. Young Corot had no interest in business. He loved to draw and paint, and was best known at the salon for ruining expensive pieces of fabric with his paint-stained hands and dirty drawing supplies.

As a schoolboy, Corot had had a fortuitous encounter with a landscape painting that changed his life. He described the painting, which he had seen in the Louvre Museum: “… 
the artist had captured for the first time the effects that had always touched me when I discovered them in nature and that were rarely painted. I was astonished. His small picture was for me a revelation. I discerned its sincerity and from that day I was firm in my resolution to become a painter.”

Corot saw in this painting his own future. After his first encounter, the boy simply haunted the Louvre. He stood open-mouthed at the paintings of Claude Lorrain, one of France’s greatest landscape painters. Eventually, the attendants at the Louvre galleries would have to physically move him on.

Corot is often described as “a dreamy youth”—with an enchantingly good nature. He spent much of his time hanging around his mother’s dressmaking studio, playing the violin, and singing for the sewing girls while they worked. Corot’s father thought he was just plain lazy. By the time he had reached twenty-six, his father had given up hope in the boy’s future. He was, in his father’s eyes—and in the eyes of his sterner teachers—a failure. One thinks, when hearing these descriptions, of young Henry David Thoreau, or of Walt Whitman at practically any age. What do we make of this list of losers and ne’er-do-wells who become great exemplars of dharma?

Corot’s father—at wit’s end—finally agreed to let him paint (“
to pursue your crazy adventure”) on the condition that he come back to the
family business when he (inevitably) discovered that painting was no kind of a life.

Corot was so delighted with his father’s decision to let him paint that he burst into tears and embraced his austere parent with both arms. Straightaway he set up an easel on the towpath next to the Seine, and began to paint. He would continue to paint until his dying day, at seventy-seven. (His father never really did catch on: When Corot, at midlife, was presented by the French government with the prestigious Légion d’Honneur for his landscapes, his father asked a friend, “
Do you really think he has talent?”)

As it turned out, Corot was not the dreamy youth he appeared to be. He was dead serious. He began to study painting intensively—initially with his good friend Achille Etna Michallon, already a well-respected teacher. Young Corot also did the usual practice of copying the masters—in the studio, and in the Louvre. But from the beginning he was enchanted by painting
outdoors
, especially in the forests of Fontainebleau, the seaports along Normandy, and the villages west of Paris such as Ville d’Avray, where his parents kept a charming country house.

Naturally, Corot studied the masters—especially his early heroes, Claude Lorrain and John Constable. But he spent as much time as he could sketching and painting in nature. In the final analysis, “nature,” he said, “was my best teacher.” He would later instruct his own students to forget all they had been taught in the gallery, and let nature teach them.
Observe carefully! Paint what you see! Paint what you feel!
“
Do not follow others,” Corot exhorted. “He who follows is always behind. You must interpret Nature with entire simplicity and according to your personal sentiment, altogether detaching yourself from what you know of the old masters or of contemporaries. Only in this way will you do work of real feeling.”

3

Every couple of weeks I climb the three flights of creaky old wooden stairs to the office of Lonny Jarrett, my acupuncturist in nearby Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The rich smell of 150-year-old wood in Lonny’s office building always reminds me of the smell of my family’s summer
house—built in 1893 by my great-grandfather, and not changed substantially since. The floors in Lonny’s third-floor garret are so slanted that the bathroom door closes itself. There is something honest and welcoming about this space: “rough-hewn as a stone.”

In Lonny’s office, one entire wall of bookshelves is stacked with yellowing esoteric books written in ancient Chinese dialects. His shelves are replete with exotic-looking medicine jars, formulas, and herbs, some bound in cloth and stamped with wax seals. There are wall charts with images of human bodies crisscrossed with red lines of
qi
, or energy. This is the enchanting world of Lonny Jarrett—a handsome, dark-haired, intelligent-looking man in his late fifties.

Lonny greets me, and we go through our little ritual. I sit down in the comfortable chair in his treatment room and hold up one arm. He holds my wrist gently while his fingers move oh-so-subtly around the area of my artery—while I stare contentedly off into the middle distance. Lonny is checking my pulses. I find this all very pleasurable. His touch is warm, soothing, reassuring. But what does he detect with his fingers? What secrets is my body giving up to him? And how does he know how to read them? He asks to see my tongue. (Later, in the car, I look at my own tongue in the rearview mirror. What does it mean, I wonder?)

Sometimes I think Lonny is just making this all up. Perhaps nothing is
really
happening in these mysterious exams. They’re a scam. A little ritual meant to inspire confidence in me. (There is a sucker born every minute.) I wonder: Is
everything
that happens in Lonny’s exotic world really just placebo? Is there an active ingredient other than his caring?

What precisely
does
Lonny feel when he checks my pulse? Clearly (unless it
is
mumbo jumbo) he is recognizing patterns of which I am entirely unaware. He speaks a language I do not understand. (When I attended my first faculty dinner party in college, I remember several of the older professors talking about wine as if each wine were an entirely new country—an exotic place with its own hills and valleys, smells, character. Huh? Was this wine-connoisseur stuff really just complete fantasy? Why couldn’t I taste that “hint of oak” that seemed so perfectly obvious to everyone else?)

After Lonny takes my pulse, I know what comes next. I take off my shirt and roll up my pant legs, take off my socks, and get up on the treatment
table. Now Lonny inserts the needles. Is he making this up, too? Does it really matter where they go? Do the “points” he “treats” really correspond to those lines on the poster displayed on the wall? He inserts the needles into points with exotic names: Reaching Heaven, Spirit’s Door, Jade Pillow.