To someone 100 years from now.
"The peak of your life will come in 30 years."
If a fortune teller told me that, I would shout back,
"That's way too late!"
Then, what if I were told, "Your work will be appreciated 100 years from now."
"That's pointless since I'll be dead!" I would want to say, but it wouldn't feel entirely bad.
I sometimes think about painters and writers who were not appreciated at all during their lifetimes, but whose work was recognized after they died.
A prime example of this is the Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh.
Everyone has likely seen his work, "Sunflowers", in a textbook or somewhere similar.
However, he was hardly appreciated while he was alive.
Poverty and mental illness. It was a series of hardships.
Sadly, true value is not always understood in its own time. His paintings are still talked about more than 100 years later.
To have someone see something I created someday. And to have them imagine, "
What kind of feelings were they having when they painted this?".
That is like a romance that transcends time.
To begin with, I feel hesitant to even bring up the genius painter Van Gogh, and I myself do not harbor any grand ambitions.
I just wonder, as someone who is nobody, can I leave behind even one fragment of my way of life and my emotions?.
Will a day ever come in the distant future when someone I don't know encounters my words and thinks, "People in the past thought about things like this"?
Thinking about such unknowable things, I feel like I was able to place a small dot in time again today.