I don't want to die like Mozart

Dr. Hake posed over his Norton Anthology of Literature in the September sun. It was one of those days he took our tiny college class outdoors, where ravens flew overhead and a never-ending caterpillar of school buses huffed down the road parallel to campus. We sat on a concrete patio at rubber-coated metal picnic tables, curling into our sweaters because of the breeze.

We lived, at the time, four to a dorm room and six to a bathroom, stepping on each other’s toes while we dropped our jaws in the universal pose of mascara application. We had no kitchen sinks, no stoves, no private living rooms. It is hard for me, now that I’ve been out of school for two years, to believe that I once considered this sardine-compactness a kind of normal life. But we had everything we needed: good friends, black mascara, freshly sharpened ambitions, and the possibility of love. Not to mention sage academics like Dr. Hake, who closed his eyes tight (as is his custom) and began to warn us literary people against the love of comfort and money.

“One of our greatest musicians, Mozart, died in poverty and obscurity,” he began. “It’s Christ-like. Suffering, misused, lonely—but committed.”

I had always felt fondness for a similar notion, encapsulated in that song by the Plain White T’s: “Hey there, Delilah / I know times are getting hard / But just believe me, girl / Someday I’ll pay the bills with this guitar.” In other words, it’s OK to live in hope and eventually to die for your art—even if you never make money.

But, like I say, I have gotten older since college. Part of my being has grown less idealistic about impoverished obscurity and much more interested in how many bedrooms houses have, what the job market looks like, and the best deal I can get on strawberries. Now a full-time producer/consumer in adult society, I no longer feel as springy about the notion of making no money. Instead I have started heaping up lavish preferences. I want a certain brand of running shoes, a certain sized kitchen window, a certain square footage in our next apartment. It brings to mind a little song we used to sing when we were children: “It seems to me / The more you have / The more you have to have to take care of the things you have.” If at this point I had to move back into a college dorm, I might die of discontentment and live perpetually as a whining ghost.

I’m not condemning my own pursuit of security, of course. It is a good desire. I only present my newest dilemma: How can I ask for good things from God, appropriate in their seasons, without slipping into the love of money? My newest favorite pastime—apartment scouting—teaches me not only about normal adult life but also about my profound human capacity for discontentment. I don’t want to die like Mozart, I confess. But I would like to live like a child of God, recognizing that my security comes from Him.