You are a living thing and those are rare enough in the universe that we shouldn’t take them for granted.) Athletes or performers who achieve this kind of perfection do so only – it’s a business-book cliché, but it happens to be true – by getting their misfires out of the way before anyone looks. At the very least, it’s a symptom of living in a society that is in thrall to the inhuman imperatives of the profit motive, and it may be a symptom of a more acute and personalized mental illness as well, the kind you need help managing. (Actual assembly lines snag and break.) If you, like me, suffer from this desire, you should regard it as a symptom. It’s the desire to press out perfect days, one after another, as an assembly line in a cartoon presses out perfect copies of the same car. The second sense of “perfectionism” is an obsession with achieving a machinelike consistency that is simply inhuman, inorganic. The term “perfectionism” has three senses that I know of, the first of which is a specialized theological doctrine that I will leave to my Methodist and Orthodox friends to hash out.
It’s one of those things where we can know we’re dead wrong and we still can’t stop.īut we can, while we’re stuck here, still make some distinctions. By now all these explanations, true as they are, fall on our ears like rationalizations: the cant of the contentedly incapable. We continue in this manner until we precipitate some serious crisis for ourselves, whereupon a therapist, a parent, a religious teacher, a friend tries to explain our mistake to us. Once you can aim, why not aim for dead center? So obvious is the answer to this question that we forget to ask ourselves whether, in some situations, a single target exists. When we first succumb to its appeal, often in childhood – the urge to line up one’s toys just so, to get one hundred on every math quiz – it seems merely logical. Like all the most dangerous ideas, perfectionism seems irrefutable. Book Tour is a bimonthly review by Phil Christman of new titles, each exploring a theme to trace hidden connections among books and writers.
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