No one can live entirely in the ideal, and no one can live entirely in the real.
Live too deep in the ideal and you become terribly fragile — one blow is enough to shatter you. That’s why children brim with ideals, and why, as the years and the mileage accumulate, those ideals quietly get forgotten. Reality is not ideal; the world is absurd. What you want, you may never get. What you get can slip from your hands when you least expect it — and steal something else from you on its way out. But live too deep in the real, and though you’re spared the ache of dashed expectations, living itself becomes the ache. A person needs something to look forward to; take that away, and life loses its hope. Honestly, I think the most brilliant thing about life is the optimistic futures people forge for themselves — white lies, in a sense. Why shouldn’t we tell them to ourselves too? If the lie costs no one anything and breaks nothing, if instead it’s the flame that relights the candle and lets us believe in the future again, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Picture it: telling yourself, in the middle of a downpour, that a rainbow is on its way; dreaming, in a desert with no way out, that an oasis lies just ahead. Isn’t that exactly the hope that keeps a person alive?
All this thinking started because I’ve been watching idol dramas again. Maybe that clashes with people’s image of me, but I honestly enjoy them. It had been ages — and going back, rewatching shows I’d already seen, somehow rekindled my longing for what love could be. The love I imagine is pure: no third parties, just two people drawn to each other — and drawn not merely in body, but in mind, in soul.
The romance in idol dramas must be love at its most perfect, its most irresistible. But you can’t watch too many. Watch too many, believe too deeply, and you drift toward an extreme — and any drift to the extreme is a mistake. Your standards for a partner creep up; the small frictions of daily life start to grate (idol dramas never show those); could it even drag down a country’s birth rate? If these dramas became prevalent enough, and everyone sank into them, standards would certainly soar, pushing young people’s values to the extreme — he must be handsome, must be attentive, must be perfect, and so on.
Still, idol dramas have their upside: they show me what love, at its ideal, should look like. No one can draw a perfect circle — yet nothing keeps the perfect circle from living in the hearts of most decent people.
To me, the most magical thing about this world is that it was designed imperfect, yet nothing forbids us from sketching a perfect one in our heads. To stand in this battered world, carrying a vision of the perfect one, and pull reality ever closer to that vision — that’s not a bad way to live.
The way I see it, every value needs moderation, and none should ever be pushed to the extreme. An idealized picture can, now and then, help us find our balance — the point from which we can look at the world and see it straight.
The more of life’s disappointments you’ve seen, the harder you should hold on to the ideal — imagining it, chasing it. Without evil there would be no such thing as good; and it’s precisely those disappointing stretches that reveal how meaningful, and how rare, perfection is.
Why is it that no matter how long I turn things over in my head, all I can write are these same values, repeated to the point of exhaustion? It must be that my understanding is still too narrow — I feel stranded on an island, cut off from the world. Reading builds the canoe? Thinking paddles it outward? I’ve read too few books and thought in too small a circle. Dreaming of carrying my values through words the way Dostoevsky did — that’s still just an ideal. But then, you’ve got to have ideals, don’t you?