The strategy behind the letter was in trying to look as if it wasn't a bulk mail mass printed piece. It had strange paragraph indents and was marked up with (unconvincing) hand drawn underlined sentences. The overall effect was fake, insulting your intelligence and it got very tedious to read. Except for a bit on the opening page. In a tortured jump from 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away', they mentioned the reason they adopted as part of their logo, one of Cézanne's paintings of apples. Why Cézanne? Wait for it... "Just as the Cancer Council New South Wales acts on many fronts at once against cancer, Cézanne's apple could be seen from several different perspectives". Yeah? But the next sentence was what intrigued me. "Cézanne said of it proudly, 'With an apple I shall astonish Paris' ". 

That was enough to send me off to Google to see if he really did say that and why. The first ' hits' talked about 'conquering Paris with an apple' but sure enough, the quote was correct and its context became clear.

It appeared first in a book on Monet by critic Gustave Geoffroy who met Cézanne in 1894, and who said how he loved the painter's enthusiasm such as when Cézanne proclaimed, "I will astonish Paris with an apple!" 
Quote from Claude Monet, His Life, His Times, His Works by Gustave Geffroy.

It's a great poetic notion (if you make pictures of apples) and when you look at Cézanne's paintings of fruit from this time, you can see how he was applying the same acute attention he paid to the light and surfaces in his landscapes, to the traditional still life. These pictures still sing (this one of apples and oranges is a particular favourite) and I'm sure they astonished Paris as he planned. 

While I was reading, I found that Cézanne was apparently obsessive about the colour of the light he painted in. In an age when you can control the colour temperature in Photoshop with a flick of the mouse wrist, I'm sure this was as much because of an emotional environment that Cézanne wanted to paint in, as it was one that would define what actual colour palette he would use that day. For months Cézanne was painting a portrait of art dealer Ambrose Vollard (it was never finished). Cézanne would often use the excuse that the light was not right and cancel sittings, but...

"Sometimes, around five in the afternoon, he would stop by my place, his face glowing with happiness, and say, "Mr. Vollard, I have good news to tell you; I am so satisfied with this afternoon that if the weather tomorrow provides a pale gray light I think that our session will go well." 

Vollard goes on to say..

It was one of his principal preoccupations at day's end: what will the weather be tomorrow? Since he went to bed early, often he would wake up in the middle of the night. Always haunted by this idea, he looked out the window at the sky. Then, once decided on this important matter and before going back to bed, carrying a candle he would go and review the work in process. If he felt good about it, he would go at once to share his satisfaction with his wife. He would awaken her and afterward, to make up for having disturbed her, he would invite her to play a game of checkers before going back to bed.
From Ambrose Vollard's Paul Cézanne (1914).

Poor Mrs. Cézanne. But I understand the obsession, even if it's so different in this time of instant photography. Like the light yesterday, it is the unpredictable variability from day to day that I find is a constant stimulation. That's one of the nice things about living in an old house where the windows are smaller and the darkness makes the changes in light more obvious. You also notice the colour temperature of the light inside this 'camera obscura'.

Waking in bed in the morning, if it's sunny, the window light throws distorted patterns from the old glass panes in an arc around the room that we've come to know well. Today, the first day of autumn, and not that far from the solstice, it was shining on the back of the bedroom door. It ends up shining in our faces in mid winter. The temperature had dropped to 5 degrees overnight and it was still that at 9.00am. It's still too warm for a frost but I think I should check the weather in the middle of the night tonight, just in case. Hey, Jan...

Both excerpts are pulled from an online page promoting - Conversations with Cézanne. Edited by Michael Doran, University of California Press.

That's guns as in the one above. Six-guns. You know. The sort cow boys use. The ones that go Bang! Bang! Bang! and Pichow! when they ricochet of the rocks. The battle was full on and the fire was exchanged by three or four voices. And it was all make believe and I haven't remembered hearing that since I was a kid. I'm sure they weren't being cow boys and indians as in my day, those movie influences are long gone, I wondered if maybe they were at war, there's been a lot of that around lately. I don't think it was cops and robbers (goodies and baddies?) because one of the kids can mimic an uncannily accurate police siren and he didn't wail at all. (He sits in his back yard and plays with some toy, making this siren noise for hours, it even has Doppler Shift 'traveling from a distance' and 'pull over driver' effects.)

It was just a lot of chasing, shouting and Bang!-ing with plastic guns and it made me feel good. I'd watched my girls slowly lose that ability to fantasy play and become too sophisticated to make believe. The youngest is 16 and she still has a talent for 'imagining' but finds it hard to get friends involved (she enjoys baby sitting younger kids and they love her playing at their level). I contemplated getting the video out and recording it but knew that would have intruded. So I just enjoyed the sounds of the sunny afternoon and was a lot happier and a bit sunburned.