The Perfect Line

While most of us probably agree that for for a life to be meaningful it must be given over to some purpose, what this purpose should actually amount to is usually not so easy to agree upon. Some of us may feel that the meaningful life is best attained by raising a family, others through the creation of wealth or employment, while a number of us may believe that meaningful life is one in which we seek spiritual advancement or the pursuit of our hobbies. Although each of these possible ways of leading a meaningful life has its own merits, it is perhaps the artist Will Eisner who provided us with the best solution when he once remarked that the purpose of his existence was no more than to “attempt to draw the perfect line”. Since Eisner was an artist there is a good chance he was speaking literally at the time rather than metaphorically, however taken liberally ‘the perfect line’ might just as well refer to the pursuit of any endeavor or action perfected – our desire to paint the perfect picture, to run the perfect business, to cast the perfect line, to raise the perfect family. In every case our pursuit of flawlessness provides us with the excuse to get out of bed every morning, since we can always try better than we did the day before.  

While this might initially seem reasonable, if we understand perfection as that which can never be fully attained, we may be worried that by constantly pursuing it we are in no more enlightened a position than a person running around chasing shadows. If on the other hand, we are able to recognise that perfection is really no more than the 'carrot on the stick' we place under our nose to spur us on, such issues are immediately put to rest: Perfection is really just a means of benign self-deception. This is surely what is meant when people tell us to: “grasp the world in your hands” or “reach for the stars” It is not that anyone is suggesting that these things might actually be possible; but that if we set our sights high enough not only we will succeed in our more realistic ambitions, we will have endless room for improvement too.

Occasional successes in our goals may of course temporarily delude us that we are on the right track towards the complete fulfillment of our ideals, but as life plays itself out it should become ultimately clear that there is no end to our personal improvement; we can always be better siblings, better artists or better employers. While to be continually thwarted in our ambitions like this might strike us as depressing, this is in fact a great cause for celebration as the complete fulfillment would ultimately entail a complete end to our purpose. It is only when there is nothing left to strive for at all that we have genuine cause for worry. This is perhaps why every businessman who starts out with the ambition to make their millions and retire, upon achieving their goal continues to accumulate even more money past the point where it could make any tangible difference to their lives – it is striving itself that gives purpose and meaning to our lives, money or any other object of desire is only its side-effect.

This is not to say however, that whatever we strive for is irrelevant in itself: There will always be additional ways in which our ideals either uplift us those around us or alternatively impoverish our existence and others. The point is rather that journeys are always far more interesting than destinations, struggles infinitely more rewarding than successes. Why else would we continually find pleasure in those cartoons in which the coyote never quite catches the roadrunner, or the cat never quite manages to lay his paws on the mouse? The satisfaction we derive from them is surely the same pleasure we take in our own struggles, which despite so often leaving us empty handed, never fail to thrill us with the possibility of a good chase.  

Where Tom the cat is happy to go on forever being taunted by the mouse he can never quite catch however, we may find in our own lives there is a limit to how much humiliation we can endure at the hands of perpetual defeat. For this reason it may even become preferable after a certain period of time to begin pursuing abstract ideals instead of tangible successes, since our ideals, unlike what is fully actual, can never inform anyone of the fact that we have yet to possess them. Despite this we may still take great pride in tangible successes when they do happen to come our way, since after all, it is always preferable to have a symbol or objective testament to ones achievements than none whatsoever. But if we do place value on our symbolic achievements, such value is surely misplaced when we properly understand the nature of striving: A trophy does not tell us anything about the struggle to victory, a certificate says nothing of the hard work we endured in order to attain it. We are in other words, always sold short by anything less than a full biography of our blood, sweat, and tears that it took in order to attain victory, and always deluded in thinking that a prize could ever serve this function by proxy. This does not by extension however, mean that trophies and cups have no worth at all: Trophies and cups will always be valuable in as much as they carry the ability to promote further struggles and ambitions. It simply means that the only prizes that are valuable are those which are not on our shelf, and are not presently hanging on our wall, since only those have the capacity to make us strive for them.

The art of perfection then is the ongoing pursuit of what we do not have, rather than the veneration of what we already do. To go against this rule and convince ourselves that we have already attained perfection or that we are just in the process of doing so, would be to misunderstand the very artfulness in the 'art' of perfection - for all great works of art are works in progress and all great masterpieces a dim reflection of what the artist originally conceived. Pursuing perfection in other words, does not mean creating some unsurpassed and therefore perfect, but creating the foundation for ever more creative work and thus ever more reason to live. Where the true artist does 'aim' for perfection in practice, we may in fact observe that he or she does so only as a means of acquiring his actual target of progressive fulfillment - no more expecting to attain perfection itself than a fisherman who aims for the horizon expects to catch the horizon on the end of his hook, or the marksman who aims his bullet at his cross-hairs expects to shoot his cross-hairs straight out of his scope. If we can somehow learn to embody this same skillful distinction between our ideals and the actual targets they helpfully guide us towards, we can perhaps now strive for our 'perfect loaf of bread' our 'perfect family' or 'perfect work of art' in the same sense Eisner strove to create his 'perfect line': Not in the belief that our ideals are attainable, but that our ideals are worth pursing precisely because we can never quite attain them. And if we have understood why our ideals are so much more useful when we do not have them, it should be clear why this is the perfect reason to be thankful.