Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: a perfectionist

    To see close up the conviction of a perfectionist creator at work on a project, see below. To see panoramically the conviction of a perfectionist creator at work over a lifetime, see this coming Wednesday’s post.
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    Here is Saint-Exupéry in a letter defending his perfectionist nature, refusing to be pressured by his publisher into letting Flight to Arras go to press before he could give his message lasting expression:

Don’t tell me I’m wrong because my manuscript is “ready to go” and I won’t be making any major changes. I won’t make any great changes in the essential message – that’s true – but I’ll greatly change its impact. This is not a question of the material or the surface narrative. It’s something that only begins to exist when one no longer sees why. And I know exactly what changes to make. They involve something that I can’t define, which concerns the lasting quality of what I say. . . . Whenever I hear an echo, years later, from an article of mine . . . it is always, always, always an article that I rewrote thirty times. When I read a quotation of my own somewhere, it is always, always, always a phrase I rewrote twenty-five times. One sees no very noticeable difference between the first and last versions. It may even be that the final version seems less picturesque, but it is bound by an inner logic. It is a seed; the other was a plaything for a day. I have never, never, never been wrong about that. (quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p.132)

Comments

[Mark Rasmussen]

While I'm new to blogging, I can imagine that this is the very first blog to start up with this quote, or anything like it. (I've rewritten this sentence just twice.)

I wonder if Saint-Exupéry would have been able to enjoy a blog. Would he agonize over every sentence? Or did he limit his drive to perfection to just his art? As a pilot, I suppose he must have had to make real time decisions and live (or die) with them.

Does life come at us so fast today that we have fewer opportunities to strive for perfection? As a dad/analyst/business man/etc., it seems that way to me. But I'll bet my grandpa thought the same thing.