Lots of studies have shown that the more you see images of perfection around you, and the more you compare yourself with those images, the worse you tend to feel about yourself.
Jhabvala, now in New York and still a friend, recalls the 18-year-old she would go swimming with as "absolutely beautiful, very quiet, tremendously well read and sensitive, and self-contained; she had a halo of perfection around her.
Such amendments strike me as novelties in a gastronomic form that reached perfection somewhere around 1840.
This idea (that man is perfectible and so should strive for perfection) has been around for 2,000 years, but it has lately been streamlined and turbo-charged: in its contemporary incarnation, it regards any unfulfilled human potentialities as a particularly sad and sclerotic form of entropy.
He demands perfection from those around him.
With my children, there is certainly an anxiety around perfection.
One sign hawked an "anti-aging manicure". Another encouraged me to "unlock the perfection". I walked around with sunglasses hiding my face bloat: I had spent the previous four days studiously poisoning myself at a music festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and had gone straight from a party to the airport, where I immediately fell asleep on the floor outside of security.
"There is lots of evidence that the issues relating to girls and their self-perception, their confidence and anxiety around perfection, is massively amplified by the impact of social media, and the very clearly gendered differences in the way that individuals behave on social media," Kevin Stannard, director of the Girls' Day School Trust, told head teachers.
We would say today that Times Square was the nation's capital of popular culture; in the 20's, the critic Gilbert Seldes coined the term "the lively arts" to refer to the popular art forms then being brought to their perfection in and around Times Square, including vaudeville, electric signs, ragtime and jazz and the revue.
With him, perfection was just around the corner.
He's also a purist whose perfection often revolves around "mistakes" that push geometry askew, along with viewers' perceptions of his rigorous work.
