I want this essay to be perfect. Not pretty good, not excellent, not even the best essay about anything you've read in a long time, but perfect in style and substance.
Of course, it won't be, I know that - in fact, I think the opening paragraph can be improved; I need to go back and tweak it (by the time you're reading this, I will have, and I'll still think it could be better) - but one characteristic of perfectionists is that we are able to comfortably hold the contradictory beliefs that perfection is both necessary and unrealizable. Recognizing the futility of the goal never gets in the way of the expectation, whether I am writing, baking, vacationing or even making love, that everything should or will be perfect. Obviously this has a down side: While everyone else in my family fondly remembers a sublime dinner we had some years ago in Paris, all I recall is that I should've ordered the lobster instead of the lamb.
I doubt that lobster was what Voltaire had in mind when wrote that "the perfect is the enemy of the good," but he recognized how the pursuit of perfection can prevent enjoyment of even the very good. Indeed, we perfectionists have a hard life, because we are never totally satisfied. My wife has said, "It must be hard being you," and the very word "perfectionist" carries a negative connotation, but it should be noted that the urge to settle for nothing less than the very zenith of excellence can carry rewards as well as regrets. Much has been written about Steve Jobs's neurotic perfectionist personality, which drove everyone around him nuts, and by most accounts, he was not the most pleasant of bosses to work for. Yet one consequence of his insistence on only the best is that he waited a full decade (a lifetime in technology years) after the first smartphones came out before releasing the iPhone, while he designed, re-designed, tweaked, and refined. I waited along with him, and was glad I did; the first time I held mine, I felt in my own hand the pulse of his genius, a synthesis of art and engineering that comes along only a few times in a generation. I felt perfection, or at least something close to it (that keyboard...).
On the other hand, Jobs's homes tended to remain largely unfurnished for years because he needed things to be perfect, the result being, his wife said, that she and Jobs "spoke about furniture in theory for eight years" before buying a sofa. I can identify with that. My wife and I stared at and endlessly discussed an empty patch of lawn for almost as long before finally building the garden we wanted there because I wasn't totally satisfied with any of our designs. Which brings up another point about the pursuit of perfectionism: it can be paralyzing.
With that in mind, when I, a non-baker, set out couple of years ago to bake the perfect loaf of peasant bread, I imposed a time limit of one year on my project. Working under that deadline, I baked like mad every single week, turning out loaf after disappointing loaf, unable to even approach the pinnacle of bread, to realize my dream of a round, rustic loaf with a golden, crisp-but-not-hard crust and an airy, yeasty, and wheaty interior.
As my deadline approached, I continued to up the ante: studying with a retired baker in Connecticut, cultivating my own wheat and yeast, travelling to Paris for a course at l'Ecole Escoffier, visiting the top bakeries in Paris and New York, looking desperately for the secret to the Perfect Loaf. Yet each week brought only failure and the promise of more failure. "Failure," relatively speaking, of course. By the ninth month my family was telling me it was the best bread they'd ever eaten, but to my palate, the crumb was too dense, the interior too moist. I kept tinkering and searching, my quest eventually leading me to an ancient monastery in Normandy, where monks had been baking bread nearly all of the 1300 years the abbey had been in existence. But two years earlier they'd lost the last monk who knew how to bake, and were now buying their bread in town. I had come to learn, but I ended up in a far different role, and with a mission: To teach a monk how to bake my (imperfect) bread, to restore the lost thirteen-century-old tradition of baking to the abbey. And it was there, at that abbey, sitting alone on a medieval wall on a glorious October afternoon, the autumn sun sparkling on a rippling stream while apples and pears ripened behind me in the orchard, feeling both relieved and giddy with the news I'd just received that our bread had been an unqualified success among the monks, that I found myself saying out loud, "This is perfect." There was absolutely nothing I would have or could have changed to make it better. Not the shower that gave you a stingy twenty seconds of water, not the icebox of a church that I sat in, shivering, as many as seven times a day, not the austere "cell" I was living in or the meals that had to be gobbled down in strict silence in just fourteen minutes. Not even the imperfect bread I had just baked. This wasn't the perfection that I had been seeking for a year, but it was the one that had, quite unexpectedly, found me.
So, did I ever bake the perfect loaf? I now think that's the wrong question to ask. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1843 story, The Birthmark, one small imperfection -- a birthmark in the shape of a hand -- on the face of Aylmer's otherwise perfect wife starts to drive him crazy, to the point where he concocts a strong but dangerous potion that he believes will erase the blemish. The potion he brews and gives to his wife works, but the victory is short-lived, for a moment after the birthmark fades away, his now-perfect wife dies. At this point Hawthorne turns to the reader and tells us not, as you might expect, something along the lines of, "See, perfection is impossible in nature," but something far more interesting. He writes that Aylmer "failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present."
If there was anything I learned from the monks in Normandy, it was the joy they took in their simple lives, their ability to see the perfect future in the present. I still strive for perfection, but these days I'm less hard on myself when I don't achieve it, and when disappointed I often put myself back on an ancient stone wall in a French abbey for a few moments. I was lucky; unlike Aylmer's wife, I survived my moment of perfection. I shan't temp fate again.
William Alexander is the author of 52 Loaves: A Half-Baked Adventure, which chronicles his pursuit of the perfect loaf of bread. His previous book, (tellingly) titled The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, was a Quills Book Award finalist and a National Book Festival selection. He also contributes regularly to the New York Times and the L.A. Times op-ed pages. Bill lives with his wife in New York's mid-Hudson Valley. His web page, which features photos of the abbey, recipes, and excerpts from both books, is williamalexander.com.
