Daily Perfection

Learning to play the violin is a recipe for perfectionism. A note is either in tune or it is not—no room for error there—and your fingers are supposed to magically find the right spot on the fingerboard with no help from frets or keys. How do your fingers learn to do this thing? By endless, daily practice. As he handed me my first violin my father told me that if the great violinist Fritz Kreisler went one day without practicing, Kreisler himself could feel the difference. If he went two days, his wife could tell. And if he went three days, the audience knew it. I also knew that, in the entire year, there was only one day when my father did not practice: Good Friday, out of respect for the Passion of Our Lord. So if the great Kreisler AND my father had to practice daily, who was I to skip a day?

Over the years my childish brain absorbed all this. Without anybody saying so, I concluded from the start that my father’s sound constituted the basic standard of violin playing, so I was perpetually dissatisfied with my own. And more than just dissatisfied: I hated it. I hated it so much that my first violin had toothmarks along the rim of the top plate, and I once knocked a bunch of hairs off my bow by hitting it in a rage against the music stand.

After ten years of practicing and hating, hating and practicing, I came to the point where I could occasionally feel satisfied with the sounds I was producing. But by then it took a minimum of two hours of daily practice to keep from losing ground. To make real progress, three or even six hours daily would be necessary. I was in college at the time, and spent much more time preparing for violin jury, for which I got one hour credit, than for the rest of my courses combined. In my all-or-none mode, it was either devote my life to music or give it up altogether. No middle-of-the-road for me, no friendly path to years of amateur music-making. I put my violin away, and turned to other things.

But the never-good-enough attitude stayed with me.

This is not a humble-brag,  because obviously my perfectionism was far from perfect. I could not have stayed alive if it had been. As a professional, a mother, a wife, a gardener, and a keeper of goats and chickens, there were plenty of shortcomings for which I forgave myself. But the tyranny of the ideal was always with me, urging me to make better compost, better cheese, better use of my time—and keeping me from ever feeling truly at ease.

Oddly enough, it was writing that saved me from becoming a dried husk of a perfectionist. If there is one area in which perfectionism is lethal, it’s in creative endeavors. Yet for some reason I can deal with my faults and deficiencies where the written word is concerned without throwing my laptop out the window. It’s not that I am blind to the infinite distance between me and, say, Tolstoy. but precisely because that distance is so great, I can be content plugging away in my own tiny corner of writerdom. This may simply be a stroke of luck, a gift from the universe, or the fact that  I didn’t grow up in the household of a professional writer.

Or maybe I inherited my father’s fortunate ability to admire without feeling discouraged. When I was twelve, my parents and I went to hear the fabulous Isaac Stern. On the way home from the concert my mother asked my father, “Doesn’t it make you envious when you hear someone play like that?” “Envious?” my father answered. “Not at all. It only makes me want to practice more.” That is how I feel when I read Proust or Colette, Anthony Trollope or Iris Murdoch. I am agape at what they do, and my ability to admire them only grows as I grow older. But by the grace of God, I am not discouraged. Although by comparison what I am doing can barely be called writing, that knowledge doesn’t keep me from sitting down at my desk, opening my laptop, and taking the plunge.