As a child, beauty is simple, our ideals are simple. We find the lifelike, vividly detailed Da Vinci more appealing than surrealist Dali. We find the things that are pleasing to the eye beautiful. We see perfection as an ideal like getting a 100% on a test, or being eloquent, intelligent, graceful.
Now I realise that perfection isn't quite as simple as all that. Something that's too perfect actually loses some of its beauty, some of its perfection. Its flawlessness is an imperfection, and it makes it less interesting, less appealing. It's like the way master potters sometimes purposefully include flaws in their work. They could make perfect pots, the ideal pot, easily, yet they choose not to, because they see that perfection is also about the acknowledgement of flaws. In the same way, I realise that as much as striving to live up to the ideals of perfection, being perfect is also about the acknowledgement and acceptance of what is not perfect.
Actually, perfection is like dance. I once said that the most important aspect of ballet is balance. It's true for perfection. And balance doesn't mean taking the middle road, but allowing a dynamic equilibrium to occur as a result of the constant battle between the two extremes, striving for perfection, and your own imperfections.
A chronicle of nose growth
'...changing the form of one's mission's almost as difficult as changing the shape of one's nose:
they are, each, in the middle of one's face and one's character - one has to begin too far back.'
― Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Yet, life is beautiful
Shattered dreams and battered reality,
Yet, life is beautiful.
Crystalline palaces never to be built,
Yet, life is beautiful
as destruction by ripples of a revolution not
Yet, life is
a rose.
Yet, life
Remains while hope still springs
Yet,
we will have happiness
Yet.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Why I take physics
I've finally found an answer which satisifies my sentiments more eloquently than my own expression ever could:
Yep, physics is the manifestation of my obsession with the paradox of the simple and the complex.
"Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness - or as Lederman put it: 'There is a deep feeling that the picture is not beautiful.' "
- Bryson, 2003
Yep, physics is the manifestation of my obsession with the paradox of the simple and the complex.
Monday, February 6, 2006
Understanding simplicity
Some of you may know I have an ongoing obsession with simplicity, and the dynamics between simplicity and complexity. I finally realise what I haven't quite been able to put into words all this while: complexity is only as complex as your lack of understanding. Once you understand, everything will become simpler. The more you can understand, the more the elegant simplicity, the organising chaos, will reveal itself. I hope that the rambling complexities I have perpetuated are becoming clearer?
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