Envy | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

In his excellent The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning mentions the limited Antonio Salieri, court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor, who was conscientious, devout, and wildly jealous of the wildly gifted Mozart who–neither conscientious, nor devout–tossed off sublime music in the interludes of a life of “wine, women and song, and he didn’t sing much.”

Nevertheless, at the end of each piece of limited, uninspired music, Salieri added a postscript, “Grazie Signore.” Thank you, Lord.

Manning continues,“Grazie Signore, for other people who have greater gifts than mine.”

And that was a prayer I had never thought of praying.

* * *

Those of us brought up by restless parents with unfulfilled ambitions—and I guess that’s many of us!!—have, from childhood, absorbed ambition and striven to be the best, to win the prize, the first prize, if there are two.

An Oxford undergraduate recently told me that at school, she had to be the thinnest, the cleverest, the best in every field she was interested in, and there were many. At Oxford, however, faced with myriad people just like her, this drive made her ricochet between anorexia and bulimia. And exhaustion. Always exhaustion.

Oh, I know all about burnout and exhaustion (though not about slenderness!)

“If you do one good deed, your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one,” C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy. Since success elevates us to a vaster ocean, this drive to be the best will inevitably burn us out and exhaust us, diminishing potential achievement.

And worse, should God ever grant a foolish Salieriesque desire to be the best, some interest and challenge would leach away from our world. It is a blessing I take for granted—that in my social circles, professional circles and online circles, I continually encounter those who are more intellectually gifted, creatively gifted, spiritually gifted, and better read. Always someone to learn from.

We all take that blessing for granted. Even the greatest living scripture expositor, speaker, scholar, writer, prophet or mystic still has much to learn…from the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us, leaving silvery snail trails to inspire…

So that’s it for envy—an occupational hazard of writers, according to Bonnie Friedman in her Writing Past Dark. Let me shed it with unforgiveness, and other cancers of the mind.

Grazie Signore, I resolve to inwardly rejoice whenever I read a writer or a blogger quite obviously better than I am.

Grazie Signore, for all those who write with the pen of angels, for they fill the world with exquisite language.

Grazie Signore, for original thinkers who make me too think.

Grazie Signore for the well-stocked mind of scholars.

Grazie Signore for all those who garden better than I, for in meandering around their gardens, I learn.

Grazie Signore for those read your word more deeply than I do, for they show me new things in it.

Grazie Signore, for those who encounter you more deeply than I do, who see your face more clearly, hear your voice more distinctly, for I learn more about you from them.

Grazie Signore, for those who are spiritually gifted, the speakers who revive my flagging spiritual fervour; the prophets who can tune into your thoughts; the mystics who can see your face and feel your heartbeat.

Grazie Signore, for the world so rich, so full of gifts, which you pour freely on all men and women.

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Brennan Manning’s prayer: Grazie Signore, thank you, Lord, for those who have greater gifts.

View from the palace, showing the island.
Image credit.

I’ve lived in Oxford for 14 years now (in two instalments) and try to walk around the Blenheim Gardens and grounds once a year, if not once a season. I love the lakes: they get me.

And, often, when I visit the gorgeous gardens of stately homes, I feel a twinge of envy. I would not feel envy if they had earned them by their labour as Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey earned his seventeeth century manor house in Dorset. The immense inherited wealth in Britain, as in Blenheim or Chatsworth, sometimes does make me feel envious, though both estates, of course, leverage and make their inherited largesse to make even more money, as is necessary in a country with high taxation, like the UK.

“I am a bit envious,” I tell Roy. “What beauty to enjoy every day! And just to have inherited it!!”

But then, as we walk around, I realise that it would take a particular temperament to live happily in Blenheim Palace, and that I might not have it.

It would, oddly, take much tolerance for imperfection. As I walked through the Secret Garden, my fingers itched as I saw weeds and plants needing dead-heading. And this despite a crew of gardeners.

You have to make peace with a crew of gardeners who cannot keep up with the garden–just as you yourself cannot!

You sacrifice privacy–for running a palace and its grounds must take an veritable armada of cleaners, housekeepers, groundsmen and gardeners.

You are pierced with worries, for the ultimate responsibility of keeping an ageing building and its furnishings shiny ultimately falls on to you.

And in this daily piercing with mundane responsibility, even with the money to throw at each hydra head of things which need to be done, you surely would not have time to be a writer.

So, though living in Blenheim Palace, with its gorgeous grounds, would be many people’s definition of the good life, it would not be the good life for me. Too many worries, and distractions. Too little privacy!

* * *

I read an American survey a decade or so ago which asked people how much money they needed to live happily; the respondents, across the income levels, said $10,000. In other words, everyone wanted just a little bit more money.
Oddly enough though, the really moneyed classes have produced relatively few creative people–writers, artists, film-makers. Keeping up with one’s lifestyle appears to siphon off energy and ambition. Each extra thing you own adds stress and worry and distraction to your life. And, for those artists who eventually became very wealthy, their best work was in the period of relative poverty.

Christianly speaking, envy, I guess, is rebellion against the plan God has chosen for your life… the IQ, family income, gifts, nationality, he has given you. At times, one wishes God had given us more–I have certainly have–but we develop both our characters and our gifts as we seek to work against constraints (of time, of our own talent, of our weakness of character, of the shortage of money or energy or strength).

Envy is wanting to live in someone else’s story–a futile wish!!–instead of trying to write the best story we can with our own life. And one can always revise the story of one’s life to make it read better. Small leveraged changes will inevitably bring about other bigger and bigger changes.

And the gifts and character we develop as we struggle in this “vale of soul-making” are certainly more precious than if we had them handed to us on a platter, like Blenheim Palace is handed down to generation after generation of the Marlboroughs.