Michael Hyde is so detail-oriented that he admits to consulting notes as he sits through interviews about his new book. "Like a maniac," he laughs. "For my benefit and for yours."
There's a serious side to that, though. Hyde, a communication professor at Wake Forest University, has obsessive-compulsive disorder. His disorder drove his interest in the subject of perfection.
Thus, his newest book, Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human (Baylor University Press, 2010). It explores our fractured pursuit of perfection through language, literature and art, and how we benefit and suffer from it.
Hyde will have a book signing at WFU's bookstore Thursday from 3 to 5 p.m.
Q. What is perfection?
A. It's a term we use so often -- this was the perfect lady or gentleman, or this was the perfect day, or the perfect meal, or they looked perfect. And what does that mean? We constantly ask that question, and then we learn it's not always good.
What I found in my work is that perfection is this innate desire and it definitely has a biological basis. But it's also affected by social and cultural aspects. We have this desire for achieving a state of completeness in our lives. We feel secure, comfortable, we feel at home with ourselves and with others. Things seem very complete. Perfection and completeness complement one another. Perfection is a state of completeness of something. It could be very good or it could be not very good. But when we talk about something being complete, by definition, then it is what it's supposed to be, and so would be perfect.
Q. Can you talk about your own relationship with perfection? I know you struggle with OCD. How has it personally affected you?
A. The book is definitely a product of my dealing with that disorder throughout my life. Luckily, not a severe case. Not as severe as, in the book, the case study of As Good As It Gets. I'm not like Jack Nicholson. There were certain things as he was getting better -- and I was sitting in the theater -- and he didn't have to lock the door five times and I actually cheered.
I've never been as bad as locking the door five times, but I've locked the door twice. The OCD that affects me now is that I sometimes have to give myself an extra 10 minutes to get out of the house so I can check things … like are the lights off in my study, is the stove off? I know the stove's off, I knew it was off when I got up in the morning. I've been in the car where I've thought, "Did I close the garage door?" A voice says to you, "You've already checked this," but you do it anyhow.
Q. You write about being "rotten with perfection" and you write about perfection being a benefit and a burden. How is it both?
A. It's a benefit when things are going really well in your life. If I'm writing -- and given that writing and research is a big part of my life as an academic -- and I'm trying to be as exact and as precise as I possibly can, and I'm on a roll, that's wonderful, that's very rewarding.
But there are other times when the drive is still there … and the drive is there to keep on getting better but you hit a wall or you hit a plateau. It's called life. But those are not enjoyable moments.
There's the classic case of anorexia or bulimia. These people want perfection so much that they'll do behavior that will kill them.
The notion of "rotten with perfection" is a notion that I appropriate from a writer who had an influence on me, Kenneth Burke, a social critic…. I add to it the notion of being "rotten with imperfection," and the case I give is George in Seinfeld. I mean, he doesn't know how to do anything. But Burke … I quote him saying the classic case of being rotten with perfection would be Hitler in the 20th century. There'd be all kind of examples now, too. All you have to do is look out on the world and see some of the horror going on in places like Darfur, for example.
Q. Is striving for perfection bad?
A. Not if it has good consequences. If somebody says, "Well, you really want to stay in shape, so you're going to lose some weight." Well, is that bad? No, I don't think that's bad at all. But if you get so hung up on it you always want to keep losing weight, we have a problem. Striving for perfection can be a very bad habit.
As soon as you start bringing in those kinds of adjectives -- good, better, best -- that implies a notion of perfection. There's this old saying "practice makes perfect," but there are coaches who will say, "That's ridiculous. No, perfect practice makes perfect." Just the skill that you try to develop where you are trying to be the best that you can is setting somebody on the road … toward perfectibility.
Q. How do you see ideas of perfection portrayed and explored in literature, art and philosophy? For instance, you discuss Leonardo da Vinci and Johann Sebastian Bach.
A. What fascinates me about people like da Vinci and Bach is that you have notions of perfection that are based in art, in mathematics and in science: the idea of a circle, the logarithmic spiral, the harmonics of Bach.
Things that are just classic. But they become standards. They allow us to get a better understanding of what … I'm looking at. In their cases it wasn't just a scientific understanding, it was an artistic understanding.
lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com
727-7302
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement