Dec
Perfectly Imperfect
When we go to visit Audrey’s cousin this time of year, I bring something amusing for the little ones. The craft shops sell small wooden toys to paint. Among them are little wooden dinosaurs which have wheels in place of feet. I like to paint them for the kids. As my background in herpetology is minimal, the colors may be a bit odd for saurians. This year there’s a blue one with grey and green stripes, a red one with yellow and gold, and a tan one with maroon and brown spots. For whatever reason, the boys do not notice that the coloration lacks any sense of authenticity.
One of my little joys is a small collection of old Marx tinplate trains. They are crude and they look quite unrealistic. The little locomotives sputter and spark as they race around the track at breakneck speeds. The tin cars clatter in a swirl of bright colors that were never seen on the tracks of any real railroad. Model railroading? No! The Marx trains are far from being models of anything real. By comparison, Lionel trains look like icons of realism and H.O. would be museum quality!
Would the wooden dinosaurs have as much appeal if they were colored like real reptiles? Would the Marx trains be as much fun if they were accurate miniature replications of real trains? Probably not. Half the fun of the dinosaurs is the wild colors and the wheel-feet. The joy of the Marx trains is the crazy racing and sparks and clatter of tin. Their very imperfection is what makes them so much fun. Like a Zen koan, one can say that their perfection is in the imperfection.
A paradox? I can think of several. One of my old saws was “The Gods can be merciful in a merciless way.” (I will explain it another time.)
There are things whose appeal is as much their flaws as their perfections. It often comes about with people. We are suspicious of a person who is “too perfect.” In fact, we are suspicious of anything that seems too perfect. A common saying states it well: ‘If it seems too good to be true, it probably is!” How much easier it is to accept the person who is not so perfect. A human frailty or even momentary lapse shows us that the other fellow is as imperfectly human as the rest of us. It makes him an equal. So it is that perfection is found in imperfection. And so we find that the paradox is not a paradox at all.
