TODAY, nearly thirty years later, I know just how right Porky was. I am a perfectionist, and my quest for perfection has been the source of some of my happiest productions, some of my worst headaches, and a certain gurgling racket in my stomach that is, I suppose, the flourish announcing an incipient ulcer.
Perfectionism is, according to my old friend Mark Dorset, a characteristic of one of the two basic styles of human endeavor. These styles are, according to Mark, “movin’ on” and “stayin’ put.” Mark ought to know, I suppose. He has been trying for most of his adult life to describe how, and figure out why, people do the things they do. (Perhaps you have in your library How Come You Do the Things You Do?—the book derived from Mark’s public television series of the same name, an analytical tour de force that rambles across a vast range of human endeavor, from cathedral-building to bartending; or perhaps you have on your coffee table Wit, Grace, and Style: Recognizing the Best of Human Endeavor from Its Artifacts, a book filled with beautiful photographs and epigrammatic snippets of text, now in its fourth revised edition, which, employed as a coffee-table object, is as important an element in modern interior decorating as Picasso’s drawing of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.)
Mr. Summers carried the movin’ on style to the point of drifting. Obviously, I work in the stayin’ put style. Here I am, still in Babbington, trying to maintain a crumbling building against decay, against time, still rowing the waters of Bolotomy Bay that I rowed when I was a boy, still walking the streets I walked as a boy, retracing my steps in my memory, still in love with the woman I fell in love with when I was sixteen. Those who stay put, Mark says, are usually perfectionists. We’re the ones who will hold on to a leaky old boat in the belief that someday we’ll get the old tub fixed up just the way she ought to be. We’re the ones who would gladly spend the second half of life in leisurely reconsideration of the first. We like our journeys short. We prefer having the end in sight when we set out, and that keeps us close to home and makes us shy of fog. We often have only one really big idea in an entire lifetime; if it arrives early, we’re likely to spend a lifetime working on it, trying to get it right, trying to fill in all the details, fill every gap, stuff every crack. This idea may come to define us so completely that we are able to work up numberless metaphorical variations on it, find that it reaches every nook and cranny of our life as the KlamKleen dust did, find that it flavors the whole of ourselves, as the flavor of clam appears in every spoonful of a good clam chowder, find that we try to incorporate every experience in the expression of this idea, as a clam (a paragon of stayin’ put behavior if there ever was one) draws into its siphon just about anything that will fit and tries to turn it into clam, a form of being that must seem, to a clam, perfection itself.
WHEN MR. SUMMERS ARRIVED, I explained that I wanted to run through the new procedures with the Tars before the actual meeting began.
“I think it would help make the meeting run smoother if they knew what to do before we asked them to do it,” I said.
Mr. Summers looked down at me and squinted, in a manner that was becoming familiar, examining my expression for any sign of humorous intent.
“You do understand that the first meeting was, well, just the first meeting, don’t you?” he asked. “We had to start somewhere.”
“Aye, sir,” I said. “I know that, but I want the meeting to be perfect.” I stood a little straighter and said with new pride: “I’m a perfectionist.”
“Well, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. “Perfection is something we poor mortals shall never see, I’m afraid.”
“But,” I said, “I figure that if we just try to make each meeting a little better—”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Not that. Not ‘Every day, in every way.’”
“‘Every day, in every way’?” I said.
“Yes,” said Mr. Summers.
“‘Every day, in every way’ what?” I asked.
Another of those squints.
“‘We’re getting better and better,’” said Mr. Summers.
“That’s the idea!” I said.
He twitched, then shuddered as if he had been hit by a Ping-Pong ball from a toy bazooka gun.
“That was my father’s motto,” he said. “He used to say it when he came to the breakfast table in the morning. He’d pound himself on the chest or pound me on the shoulder or squeeze my mother—she was quite a plump armful, my mother—and he’d say, ‘Every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better.’”
“Maybe we should use it as the Tars motto,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I thought the motto was ‘Onward, ever onward.’”
“Oh, sure. But I can just rewrite that part and then retype it all and it will look just as if that was always—”
“No, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. “You know what the poet says, don’t you?”
“Well—” I said, unsure which of the poet’s sayings Mr. Summers might have in mind. “The poet” was a device my father sometimes used, so I recognized it at once. “The poet” might not be a poet at all. My father’s saying, “You know what the poet says, don’t you?” was a way of introducing something he didn’t want to be quoted as having said, like “Don’t fart into a tailwind,” or something the author of which he didn’t know.
“‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on,’” Mr. Summers said. “‘Nor all your piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line.’ That’s what the poet says.”
“Well, it’s really not that hard,” I said. “It’s a nuisance, but—”
“No, Peter,” he said.
“But it would give a Tar something to cling to in rough seas.”
“No, Peter.”
“Aye, sir.”
In Topical Guide 220, Mark Dorset considers Projects: The Quest for Perfection in Them and Poetry: Finding Wisdom in from this episode.
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