too perfect theory

When I start reading something -- a book, a magazine, an article, a cereal box -- I am compelled to read every word until the end. Which explains why I seldom read The New Yorker, even though I have it on my Bloglines, which, to sidetrack a bit, is the best thing to happen to my blog-reading habit (I read 62 blogs on a near-daily basis). The articles are simply too long and headache-inducing to wade through on screen.

But today, I got sucked in to an 11-page piece (yes, 11 whole pages with little paragraphing), The Real Work (by Adam Gopnik), about modern magicians and the meaning of life.

Towards the end, he wrote about what mindful magicians called the Too Perfect theory, which I understand to be the belief that when a trick is too perfect, it ceases to be believable.

"But the Too Perfect theory has larger meanings, too. It reminds us that, whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is “dynamic,” unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it’s a trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person’s ability to let the trickery go on. Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them from becoming schematized, to let them be imperfect, and the question between us is always “Who’s the magician?” When we say that love is magic, we are telling a truth deeper, and more ambiguous, than we know."

This appeals to the imperfectionist in me.