<p>1 [last name redacted] The Disorientation and Terror of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night</p><p>In Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, neither the stars nor the night resembles the images</p><p>I normally associate with those words. When I peer up at a clear night sky, I expect to see uncountable thousands of pinpoints of light in a background like black velvet. But this night sky contains exactly eleven balls of flame and a crescent moon, each throbbing like a star in the process of going nova. Despite the lack of clouds, the background races and whirls like a boiling sea, and I feel disoriented, as if the sky might suck me up into it and submerge me, drowning me in light.</p><p>More than anything else, The Starry Night suggests how fine the line between beauty and terror can be.</p><p>Nothing about the painting suggests delicacy. Each brushstroke spreads thickly across the canvas, as if applied with a trowel instead of a tuft of hair. Colors stand out distinctly rather than blending. The line that forms the border between earth and sky reminds me of the outline you find around letters in graffiti, while above it the horizon shimmers like the northern lights. The tree  I think it’s a tree, but I can’t swear to it  in the foreground thrusts upward like smoke, or more accurately a dark flame.</p><p>Beneath all of this chaos lies a village, a few rough depictions of houses with gaping holes for windows and doors and the occasional implication of a candle or lantern. It takes up such a small portion of the landscape that it appears crushed under the weight of the sky. In the village center, a small and empty church points its impossibly high, fragile steeple at the center of the whirlpool above. When I finally turn away, I am left to ponder whether it has directed my gaze at a presence or an absence, a cosmic energy or a spectacular void at the center of the universe.</p><p>Word count: 320</p>