Topic

Perfection

Perfection in this collection is an aspiration rather than a destination, and the most interesting entries are about what aspiring to it costs. Aristotle ties it to pleasure — pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work — which makes the perfection of craft a symptom of engagement rather than an independent goal. Hemingway on mastery is the closest the collection gets to a process description: become a master in your old age by recovering the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "you were made perfectly to be loved" arrives as the human exception: in love, the perception of perfection is the state, not an assessment of fact. Wilde on treating women as normally rational — how can anyone expect a woman to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as a perfectly normal human being — uses the concept satirically. Ovid's no unalloyed pleasure, no joy without anxiety, is the philosophical realist position: perfection is not available to finite creatures, and the anxiety is not an imperfection but a feature of having anything to care about.