Ad astra per mortem

I found this quotation today on Roger Ebert's journal. It's from Vincent van Gogh, on the journey from life to the stars:

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age, would be to go there on foot.

I go there on wheels, or like a spark when the light switch is flicked off. Where does it go? The stars were aborning 13 billion years ago and their light reaches us just now from across the painted ceiling of the universe. It took Michelangelo to paint God on the Cistine Chapel; what God paints us on the frescoes of the sky?