The mysterious, imperfect world

Gosh, Gopnik always delivers. I think I first came across him via C and his delightful introduction to Molly Hughes. This reminded me a bit of Rowan Moore's superb essay on the Twin Towers in which he writes about something called 'deliberate imperfection' in the Japanese tradition. 

There's something imperfect about our world, something that shall forever make it incomplete and not quite right. That blank space, that line that is slightly askew, the wrinkles on our hands, are also the source of longing. It is through the cracks-as the old cliche goes-that the light comes in. Broken circles, and all that.

Anyways, here's the dope, kiddo:

'For, deeper still, in some primal part of us, there is always a vital role for the not-too-perfect in our pleasures. Imperfection is essential to art. In music, the vibrato we love involves not quite landing directly on the note; the rubato singers cultivate involves not quite keeping to the beat. What really moves us in art may be what really moves us in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”: the vital sign of a human hand, in all its broken and just-unsteady grace, manipulating its keys, or puppets, and our minds. Expressiveness is imperfection, and Harryhausen’s monsters and ghouls are expressively imperfect. “I don’t think you want to make it quite real. Stop-motion, to me, gives that added value of a dream world,” he once said, wisely, himself.'