MICHELANGELO AND ME

I once saw -- thoroughly experienced, really! -- Michelangelo's astonishing statue of David. Enough to put any man (even an NFL quarterback) to embarrassed shame. Funny, though, how the image of this magnificent sculpture comes back to haunt you...

There I was sitting in my car waiting for Joan to come out of the store. A procession of human anatomies passed my way every few seconds. Entering and leaving the supermarket, each one less like a David (or an Athena) than I cared to ever imagine. Too tall..too short...too lean...too thick...too much sticking out here and too little there. Being altogether too human myself, it was a depressing mural of the imperfections of our lumpy species.

Hard to avoid the question stepping out in this procession -- why are we so far from the ideal? Why does God or Darwin give us such stunningly evolved forms in the hands of great artists, when we ourselves remain so deformably distant from the ideal? How fair is that!

Later, munching on some of the precarious comfort food we brought back home, it suddenly struck me. How simple. How obvious. Ideals are goals not givens. They are about what we can be not what we are. And so ideals quite properly are meant to be-- just like the vaunted David -- a little further than we can touch, A little more than we can hold. As Michelangelo himself wrote in later years: If all beauty were possible here, then why a heaven...?

I absolutely agree. Only does this mean I absolutely have to give up the greasy comfort food...?