Orwell and a Hard Decision

A few weeks ago I found an Orwell novel at the local used bookstore called Keep the Aspidistra Flying. It was my last summer novel before the school year started, and it was, as is always the case with Orwell, a provocative book. It tells the story of Gordon Comstock, a poet who has declared a personal war on Money. Living in England after the first World War, he is disgusted by the servitude of all around him to the endless and pointless task of earning more money. He is pressed reluctantly through school towards employable skills, and then coerced into finding a "good job"--something that will preserve the appearance of middle-class respectability. This unspoken pressure to be respectable is personified by the aspidistra, an ugly and useless plant kept in most middle class windows at the time. It can survive with little water or light, and scarcely anything--even burning it with half smoked cigarettes--seems to be able to kill it. Gordon finds ready employment in the advertising industry, where he has an unwelcome talent for writing slogans. He despises his vapid co-workers, the artless job, and the waste of his real literary talent. He is allured by some small successes in his poetic work to quit the advertising firm and devote himself fully to real literature, taking a menial job as a bookseller to support himself. He finds in doing so that his creative and personal vitality is sapped by lack of money; he doesn't have money to eat, smoke, have a cup of tea, or even take his girlfriend (Rosemary) for a train ride in the country. Constantly feeling the pressure of family and the ubiquitous aspidistra to take a "good job," he maintains his principled stand and works when he can to become a real poet, tortured by days when success seems imminent, followed by days of utter despair at his failure. Broke, indebted, and friendless, he learns that Rosemary is pregnant with his child. With London Pleasures (his unfinished magnum opus) in his pocket, he reluctantly takes the hateful job that will cost him his literary future but will provide for Rosemary and his unborn child.


"He was aware of a lumpish weight in his inner pocket. It was the manuscript of London Pleasures. He took it out and had a look at it under the street lamp. A great wad of paper, soiled and tattered, with that peculiar, nasty, grimed-at-the-edges look of papers which have been a long time in one's pocket. About four hundred lines in all. The sole fruit of his exile, a two years' fetus which would never be born. Well, he had finished with all that. Poetry! Poetry, indeed! In 1935!
What should he do with the manuscript? Best thing, shove it down the w.c. But he was a long way from home and had not the necessary penny. He halted by the iron grating of a drain. In the window of the nearest house an aspidistra, a striped one, peeped between the yellow lace curtains. He unrolled a page of London Pleasures. In the middle of the labyrinthine scrawlings a line caught his eye. Momentary regret stabbed him. After all, parts of it weren't half bad! If only it could ever be finished! It seemed such a shame to shy it way after all the work he had done on it. Save it, perhaps? Keep it by him and finish it secretly in his spare time? Even now it might come to something. 
No, no! Keep your parole. Either surrender or don't surrender. 
He doubled up the manuscript and stuffed it between the bars of the drain. It fell with a plop into the water below.
Vicisti, O aspidistra!"

A little over two weeks ago I was offered a fellowship with the New World Symphony Orchestra in Miami, FL. For the past ten years I have studied to be an orchestral trumpet player. I have practiced every day, I have attended six years of school, and I have taken more auditions than I can count. At times I've been among the last few standing at the finals. At times I've not even advanced beyond the first round.
My wife has waited patiently for me win an audition. She has endured daily hours of the same excerpts for years, listened to my inevitable vomiting the night before an audition, consoled me in the aftermath, and sacrificed much financial and personal stability that could be had by the same zealous pursuit of a career teaching music in the public schools.
The process of our decision was complicated and wretched. It came to us unsought, and with either choice would come much grieving. The orchestra, which is a musical academy functioning as a full-time performing orchestra, was only able to offer us dormitory-style housing in the company of twentysomethings. Accepting the fellowship would require us to leave friends and family in Rochester. It would mean the sacrifice of our professional inroads in the NY area. It would mean that our son would only see his uncles and grandparents over holidays. It would have no guarantee of a job or income at the end of the three and a half year program. It would mean the sacrifice of my uninteresting but hard-to-find teaching job at LCS.
I couldn't abide the thought of not going. Every former orchestra member and professional connection recommended the program with high praise. Those who knew us personally and our situation told us not to go. None envied the task of making the decision. Should we voluntarily turn down a won audition? Should we bring an infant to a cramped dormitory in Miami?
During and after I shrunk from the counsel of Christians. They simplified the decision to a choice between family or career values. They insinuated that God had purposed this, as some sort of test. They promised great rewards if I chose the right answer on the test. They are people I love and respect. And they (unwittingly) painted our God as a vivisectionist, directing me along ten years of work only to be forced to kill with my own hands the long-awaited issue. Yet perhaps it is time to rethink a God I would prefer be distant and, on my terms, benevolent.

ὃν γὰρ ἀγαπᾷ Κύριος παιδεύει,
     μαστιγοῖ δὲ πάντα υἱὸν ὃν παραδέχεται.

For the Lord loves he who he rears, and chastises every son he recieves.

I do not know why the events of the past few weeks have come. Was I committing some sort of career idolatry that needed to be punished? I still don't have an answer. I do know that there are two things I find untenable. One is to stop taking orchestra auditions, if there is, somewhere, a chair in an orchestra where I can play Brahms and Bach for a living. The second, and more important, is to compromise how I love my wife. It would have been dishonor to compel her to Florida, although, I think, she would have gone. It is dishonor now for me to sulk and hold it against her, as I have selfishly done for the past few days. No more--it was already a marvel and a wonder that I should have the privilege to be married to her. I will forget it no longer.

O aspidsitra, invicti erimus.