wheat is wheat, but wheat still has to grow - is the trite kind of wisdom that is proliferated on social media. someone takes a sentence from a letter, a book, a diary, removes it from the circumstances that gave it meaning, and turns it into a neat little reassurance about life.
van gogh’s wheat quote has become one of those things.
“if i am worth anything later, i am worth something now. for wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning.”
the interpretation usually goes something like this: your worth is inherent, other people simply haven’t recognised it yet, so keep being yourself. eventually, your people will get you.
it is a convenient reading of the quote. van gogh was writing to theo about his work, trying to explain why he believed what he was doing could eventually amount to something. and in the same passage, he says something that tends to disappear when the quote gets extracted:
“if i am no good now, i shall be no good later on either.”
that sentence changes the character of the whole thing, lmao. he wasn’t saying the future would vindicate whatever he was doing in the present. he was saying that if the work he eventually produced was going to be good, there had to be something in the work he was producing now that could develop into it. the later work would be the same thing, only more mature. there is a responsibility in that which gets lost in the instagram version, because “people don’t recognise your worth yet” can become an explanation for almost anything.
nobody likes the work? they don’t understand it. the business isn’t working? the market isn’t ready. people keep criticising you? they’re threatened by you. nothing has improved? you’re still becoming.
eventually you can build a worldview in which every piece of evidence against you becomes another reason to believe in yourself. failure becomes proof that you are early. criticism becomes proof that you are misunderstood. rejection becomes proof that the right people haven’t arrived yet. at some point that isn’t confidence anymore. it is a way of making yourself immune to information.
there is nothing wrong with believing that recognition is an unreliable measure of value. people get things wrong. good work gets ignored, bad work gets celebrated, van gogh hardly needed to be told that. but there is a real difference between saying “other people may be wrong about me” and saying “if other people disagree with me, their disagreement is probably evidence that they haven’t understood me.” the first is independence. the second is complacency.
and van gogh’s own attitude toward his work was not complacent. he talks about studying nature, working from it, wrestling with it, trying to get better. he was not waiting for history to discover that he had been a great artist all along. he was working to find out whether there was actually something there.
that is what makes the wheat metaphor more demanding than the way it usually gets presented. wheat can be mistaken for grass, but it still has to grow. the fact that something has potential does not mean the potential has been realised. the fact that you may become good at something does not make what you are doing now good. your future self cannot be used as evidence for your present self.
this is where our obsession with “potential” becomes slightly absurd. potential is flattering because it does not have to submit itself to judgment. you can spend years talking about what you are capable of doing without ever finding out what you can actually do.
the actual work is less comfortable. someone can look at it and tell you it isn’t very good. a customer can refuse to pay for it. an editor can reject it. a market can ignore it. a friend can tell you the idea isn’t working. and sometimes they will be right. that doesn’t mean you have no worth. it means the work needs work.
human worth and the worth of something a person has produced are not interchangeable. a person can have dignity and produce mediocre work. someone can have enormous potential and waste it. neither is an indictment of their humanity, it is simply an acknowledgement that becoming good at something requires more than believing you already are.
which is why i think the instagram version of van gogh’s quote misses the more interesting point. he wasn’t offering people permission to regard themselves as secretly excellent. he was making an argument about continuity: if the thing you eventually become is genuinely worthwhile, there should be some evidence of it in the thing you are doing now.
wheat is wheat, but wheat still has to grow.