FEBRUARY 16, 2020 – Political campaigns promote many ideas for perfecting the world. In our more lucid moments, we know perfection is elusive, but the appeal of universal justice, health care, and prosperity is intoxicating.
Though we don’t have a snowball’s chance in Minnesota today of achieving universal perfection, I’ve had three experiences that suggest perfection is not as it’s billed. The first occurred aboard a train from Copenhagen to Paris in June 1979. The second was outside a Warsaw bakery in June 1982. The third revelatory experience happened at a movie theater in October 2004.
In the favored cliché of guest-experts on cable news, “let me unpack” each of these experiences.
Aboard the train, I found myself in a compartment with three other passengers. One was a young Swedish artist who told us she was moving to Paris. When asked why, she explained that life in Sweden had become too safe, secure, and predictable. “For an artist,” she said, “that’s no good. I need stress and tension in my life in order to produce great art.”
Hmmm, I thought. I’d just come from a sojourn with Swedish relatives. I knew they enjoyed a fairly comfortable life and had no need or desire to move. But then again, none fancied her/himself an artist per se. (Interestingly, two younger cousins grew up to be artists of a fashion (the stage; architecture) and wound up living abroad for years.)
Over the years, I’ve thought about the implication of that artist’s statement: even when life’s good, it leaves a person wanting.
The Warsaw experience also tied back to Sweden. The week before I’d run the Stockholm Marathon with thousands of other runners from “first world” countries. The unusually hot weather had made the race brutal.
The next day, I traveled to Poland. Although martial law had been in force since the previous December, I gained admittance (the regime was desperate for hard currency) and took a load of (concealed) food to friends in Warsaw. While walking among the armed patrols in the streets, I saw a block-long line of people trying to buy bread at a small bakery. It was just one sign of food shortages throughout the country. After sneaking a photo, I thought about the marathon back in Stockholm, in the “perfect” country in a world of material abundance; back where thousands of people blessed with the greatest creature comforts in history, were still craving “stress and tension.” Safe, secure, and well-fed, we’d had to find some way to torture ourselves in order to feel good about ourselves. For the starving Poles of that day, life was quite a different proposition.
Then the movie—a thriller, with ample mayhem and murder, all of it pure fiction, and most baffling, pure entertainment. As I dug into the popcorn, I thought of my opposition to the war in Iraq. “And yet you’ll pay money to be entertained by a film featuring humankind’s inhumanity to humankind?” said my inner voice.
We’ll never be satisfied, even when we’re satisfied.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
