In a time where people share all sorts of data, even what they purchase through their credit cards, my favourite painter of all time, Vincent van Gogh, has every recorded bit of his personal correspondence splashed-out onto the Internet for all to see. I'm quite certain that the database is legally in the black, as most of the letters have been in print for decades.

You can see the entire database containing the letters here.

Personally, I think it would feel extremely weirding to know that anybody could sift through my personal correspondence once I've died. I'm not entirely sure I'd even like my family to do that, or to read their journals!

But there's a big flip-side to this, for me.

As I once picked up Kurt Cobain's "Journals" I didn't feel ashamed of reading it, and I don't think I'd feel ashamed by reading it again. Yet, I can't say why I don't want to read personal correspondence. Maybe it's because it would be too personal? I've gone through a period of sifting through school-books that X and I have unearthed from our respective pasts, which has been a lot of fun. But very personal letters? Hm. And yeah, it's been real fun reading the part of Cobain's journals that are doodles, musings on potential band-names, brainstorming for a cleaning-company with Krist Novoselic and anti-anti-feministic drawings, but incredibly hard to read his notes from the latter part of his life. And to seem even more hypocritical, I'd love to read Sylvia Plath's "Unabridged Journals" - despite her ex-husband's alleged burning of the last journals. Why?

I think it all boils down to this: van Gogh's art means so much to me on very basic, subconscious levels, roping me in all the way to my more conscious levels, that I don't want to know his inner workings; I really don't want to know why he painted the sky in those colours. I just want them to work me out! I don't want to find out more about his relationship with God. Fuck it! I don't want to delve into his profound - I get enough of that from work. Don't, don't, don't! To me, it'd probably be a bit like discussing Rimbaud's poetry; I might learn something, but it wouldn't heighten my emotions.

Also, I don't really relate to Plath and Cobain in the same way as with van Gogh.

Would you mind having everything you've created splayed on the Internet when you're dead? Photographs of your clothes, scribbles from your notebooks, photographs from every possible moment, the secret names you gave your pets?