Word: asylums
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...Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984, crop- eared and dazed in Arles: "Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant." Two months after writing this, he voluntarily entered the lunatic asylum at Saint-Remy in Provence; and 15 months after that, discharged but still plagued by unassuageable fits of melancholy, he shot himself to death in the rural village of Auvers, just north of Paris. Van Gogh was 37 when he died -- at the same age, it has often been noted, as Raphael, Caravaggio...
...closer he thought he got to its "essence": its high tender color and sometimes violently modeled forms, its archaic antiquity and, above all, its light. In Arles the initial shock of the landscape, impacted in citron and chrome yellows, had dominated his palette. But once he was inside the asylum at Saint-Remy, a different and more reflective way of looking at the landscape around him took over. "What I dream of in my best moments," he wrote, "is not so much striking color effects as once more the half-tones...
...with Van Gogh's fear of his own ailment, whatever it was (epilepsy complicated by syphilis is a likely guess). It is as though the calmer color, the growing penchant for structuring his work as a process of sequential research into a given motif -- a walled field near the asylum, the olive grove outside it, the pines in the asylum garden -- had an apotropaic use for him, keeping at bay the demons of the unconscious. He wrote incessantly; his letters from the asylum, unmarred by a single note of self-pity, are among the most lucid and heartbreakingly frank disclosures...
...during the primary race, Kennedy's staff heard that his principal rival, George Bachrach, intended to confront him with a question about Citizens Energy's possible links with Libya. A check showed there was no connection. When Bachrach leveled the charge, Kennedy sprang a counterattack. "Libya offered Sirhan Sirhan asylum after he killed my father," he said, eyes blazing. "For you to think for one second that Citizens Energy would have anything to do with Libya is just totally off base." The race was never close after that...
...moderate, Wolde had opposed parts of a new draft constitution that would make the country a full-blown Soviet satellite. He is expected to seek asylum...