A stick in the mud. Nobody has ever accused me of it before, not even indirectly as far as I am aware, but still, my own assessment is that if this is not what I have become, then its at least what I am in danger of becoming. Its probably self satisfaction which is the cause. Im almost afraid to do things much differently from the way I do them because I like where I am enough to want not to risk losing it. I have occasional dark moments of deep dissatisfaction and fear there is no hope at all. As well as this though, the moments of deep satisfaction, completeness, serenity, ease and perfection. It is as if the outlook hopeless, bit the inlook is perfect. Having used the word perfect I can remember, as I always do when I think of it, meeting somebody who used to belittle the idea and insist that perfection was boring. We would get into dispute over it because my response to this summing up was that it could not be true since, by definition, the complaint of boringness means to be flawed in that way, so nothing that adequately satisfied the definition of perfection could suffer from being at all boring. I didnt understand how she found this conclusion unconvincing as I couldnt understand how anybody could mix up their definition of perfect with the definition of dismal. I tried to illustrate. What creatures do you think of when you think of perfection? The Big Cats? Leopards, lions, tigers, etc. Big fish? Blue whales, dolphin, shark. Insect predators like spiders and ladybirds. Imaginary places of perfection, like Atlantis, the hanging gardens of babylon or heaven. Natural phenomena like fire, stars, tidal waves, earthquakes. The perfect soldier, the perfect hero, the perfect gentleman, the perfect win, the perfect drive, the perfect goal, the perfect sound, the perfect picture, the perfect date, the perfect movie, the perfect theatre show, the perfect diamond. You dont think of boring things when asked to imagine things which satisfy these descriptions, do you? I think it was her fault. Perhaps, I dont know, she had decided perfection was so impossible, to add a label to it with derogatory connotations so as to convince herself her less than perfect ambition is better than the perfect unobtainable one? Almost as if to say, we cannot be perfect so we may as well be insidious. I disagreed with her conclusion then, and no amount of reconsideration has convinced me her conclusion can be thought to me to be right, not at least in any way that satisfies the requirements of the definition of what perfection means. It neednt in fact be the only goal, that isnt what I mean, aim for brilliance or something other than perfection, it isnt really about goals, or even reality, its about what a word, most usefully, means.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 01:40:31 +0000
Trending Topics
© 2015