This is a blog entry from this day back in 2010. I came across it this morning and thought it fit my mood for this morning. Must be something in the date…
As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.
——Ernst Fischer
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I’ve wondered about the concept of perfection for some time and quite some time back came to that conclusion that perfection is not a human quality, that we are defined by our imperfections. That’s somewhat what the quote above says. When I read it, it struck me at once but I had never heard of the writer, Ernst Fischer. Looking him up, I found him to be an Austrian Marxist writer who waved the banner for Stalinist policies for many years but in his later years ( he died in 1972) came to regret his past. His memoir of his life began with a chapter that was titled Was That Me?, indicating his astonishment at looking back and seeing the phases he went through in his life.
I think most of us could start our own memoirs with that same first chapter title. I know I could, even though I feel that I am very much the same at the core now as I was in my earlier days. My actions were not always consistent with that core, however. I was, and am, a walking exhibition of flaws, imperfections.
As are we all.
Maybe it’s when we begin to align our actions to what we are at the core that life begins to appear become easier to swallow and our imperfections become less evident and not worn on our sleeves for all to see. I’m not talking about trying to acquire perfection. No, I mean that we just try recognizing the flaws that make up each of us and accept them. Life is in toleration- of others as well as of ourselves
Please bear with me here. One of the problems of doing a daily blog is that I often post things as though I were writing them in a journal, unedited and just as they fall out of the mind. They are not always fully realized thoughts or ideas and will soon be questioned in my own mind, like reading an old journal written when much younger and wondering , “What was I thinking there?” or “Was that me?” You hope that, as we age and gain experience, that this is a less frequent happening in our lives. But writing in this public forum, forcing out words each day, it sometimes reappears.
One’s imperfections become apparent.
Phew! I don’t know what I just said here and I don’t really want to reread it so I’ll let it hang out there for now, flawed though it may be.
The piece at the top is a tiny painting, 2″ by 4″, that I call Red Eye. For some reason unknown to me at this point, I felt it fit this post.
Redtree Times 