In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s an historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage, and I admire that—the layers of time you have when looking at sheets of papyrus that were produced in the third century B.C. and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.
That’s poet Anne Carson, who won the Nobel Prize a few days ago. The source is here.
Carson’s quote reminds me of Loraine Besser’s observation that keeping things interesting is more neglected than keeping them pleasurable or meaningful.
