Month: April 2020

In Amadeus, Antonio Salieri rejects his father’s bourgeois commercial life and offers himself (?) in exchange for art and fame.

While my father prayed earnestly to God to protect commerce, I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of: Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world. Dear God make me immortal. After I die let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life, Amen.

After a month of quarantine and economic lockdown, I offer that Antonio was wrong about the relative diginity, fame, and importance of mere commerce. Commerce is what in fact makes the flourishing of art possible to the degree that 18th century Vienna experienced.

Three cheers for Old Man Salieri and his trade. And while Antonio may be the patron saint of mediocrities everywhere, he may also be the blessed patron of those who cannot see upon whose shoulders they stand.

The longer this goes on, the more I will be focused on the local and the narrow. While I’ve been less and less concerned with news over the last decade, this is really speeding up the process. I find myself occasionally jumping in but not caring pretty fast. Spending precious energy and time on things which I cannot change is not valuable.

Here are my general rules now that we are about a month in:

Consume only enough news to get the big picture. This takes less than five minutes. I’m not kidding.

Get outside.

Shades, curtains open. More light is better.

Keep working.

Do not descend down any rabbit holes, especially COVID related. Most are wrong and you don’t know which are right. You just don’t.

You don’t know.

Reduce the number of variables you care about because the number that you can’t control have gone up. Stop caring about things you don’t control.