Perfection

 We are well into the second semester of law school, and I felt today the first jab of real regret. It's not that today was a particularly bad day. It was just a rather deadening one. And all at once a sadness came over me that I had managed to keep at bay and shunt off to the margins of my consciousness until now. Suddenly, I missed my house. I missed New England. I missed my family. I missed my job. I couldn't remember any longer why it had seemed necessary to tear everything apart, pick up, and relocate halfway across the country to start a new life. 

After all, wasn't my previous life perfect? Didn't I have a job doing meaningful work that—if not absolutely ideal in every regard—at least I could trust wasn't doing active harm in the world? (The same, I need hardly point out, cannot be said of much of what yawns before one on the other side of law school graduation.) Didn't I have a nice place to live? Wasn't I close to my family? Wasn't I, in short, as settled as one could hope to be in one's early thirties? 

My sister and employer certainly didn't understand my motives. Why, when we were so close together, and I had a job that made that propinquity possible, would I needlessly upset things? Why, when I was entrusted with tasks at work I felt I was good at and knew how to do, which fed my sense of purpose and meaning, did I decide at that very moment—when the state of perfection had just been reached—to chuck it all up? My employer kept thinking my actions must be due to some discontent at work, but it wasn't that at all—I liked my previous job. 

I reflected at the time on the paradox of it. It wasn't that I was unhappy in my previous life; rather, the problem seemed precisely to be that I was too happy. My life had reached a state of perfection. And perfection, as we know, is incompatible with motion. (In Herbert Read's rather mysterious novel, The Green Child, the higher the state of spiritual perfection people obtain, the more closely they resemble inert stones.) Perfection is, in short, a fundamentally static state: an equilibrium of the emotions. Once one has reached it, there is nowhere further to go. 

But I wanted to go further! I wasn't content with stasis! I even wrote about this at the time, in a sermon I delivered roughly a year ago: It’s not that I in any way disliked my job or my life, I tried to explain, But the very fact that it felt like a finished product started to seem like a problem, rather than a relief. [...] 'Alright,' I thought, 'so maybe my life has turned out slightly better than I always feared. This life is not a bad life. But what about all the other lives I could have lived, but didn’t. Is it now too late for them?'

And so I insisted on doing what my family and colleagues found so baffling: I tore up all that I had spent years building. I left my job; I sold my house; I moved far away. I was like the hero of Alain-Fournier's incomparably poignant novel, The Lost Domain (Le Grand Meaulnes), who mysteriously abandons his long-lost love at the very moment when he has finally found her again and established for himself the perfect domestic idyll that he spent decades seeking. 

What is the perversity that leads us to destroy our happiness at the very moment of its consummation? Is it, as Alain-Fournier's narrator considers, that we fear the "incomparable happiness" we have attained will somehow be snatched away from us, and so, in a perverse desire to rid ourselves of this dread by consummating it, we act to bring on the very apocalypse we fear? Do we experience, then, as Alain-Fournier writes, "some terrible temptation to smash, and irrevocably, this rare treasure [we] had won?" (Davison translation).

Perhaps so. We often act, strange as it is to say, to destroy perfection so soon as it intrudes into our lives. But perhaps this is not so self-destructive and inimical to life as it may at first appear. Perhaps, to the contrary, it is perfection that is inimical to life. And it is the possibility of more life—of the continuation of life, of time, of movement, that we seek to vindicate and protect, whenever we smash the perfection around us.