Black lacquer cover with the title What Is Perfection and a cobalt circle that does not quite close, a gold point marking the gap.

What Is Perfection

Perfection is supposed to be the top of the scale: the state a thing reaches when nothing more could be improved, and the state nothing ever quite reaches. The foundation says perfection is not a state of a thing at all. It is the exemplar — the complete and exact form of a condition, prior to the first attempt at it — and a mark cannot be it, because a mark and a form are two kinds of thing. That is why you can spot a bad circle without having seen a perfect one, why a perfect storm is not a good storm, why “nothing is perfect” needs no survey, and why “perfect”, said as praise, is a fact about the praiser. … readWhat Is Perfection