love & magic

But the Too Perfect theory has larger meanings, too. It reminds us that, whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic", unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it's a trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person's ability to let the trickery go on. Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them from becoming schematized, to let them be imperfect, and the question between us is always "Who's the magician?" When we say that love is magic, we are telling a truth deeper, and more ambiguous, than we know.

Adam Gopnik, "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," New Yorker, March 17, 2008.

Comments

[lipcan3]

thanks JRD, that's a good one.