Maestro Perfection Quotes

I'm fine." It's a lie. I am not fine. My head is a symphony of pain, a sadistic master maestro conducting an opus of excruciating, devastating perfecting.

We must know when to move on. To search too long for perfection can also paralyse.

The greatest book in the world, the Mahabharata, tells us we all have to live and die by our karmic cycle. Thus works the perfect reward-and-punishment, cause-and-effect, code of the universe. We live out in our present life what we wrote out in our last. But the great moral thriller also orders us to rage against karma and its despotic dictates. It teaches us to subvert it. To change it. It tells us we also write out our next lives as we live out our present. The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction. It is much greater. It is a work of art. It understands men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral. It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men. Not animals, not gods. It understands truth is relative. That it is defined by context and motive. It encourages the noblest of men - Yudhishtra, Arjuna, Lord Krishna himself - to lie, so that a greater truth may be served. It understands the world is powered by desire. And that desire is an unknowable thing. Desire conjures death, destruction, distress. But also creates love, beauty, art. It is our greatest undoing. And the only reason for all doing. And doing is life. Doing is karma. Thus it forgives even those who desire intemperately. It forgives Duryodhana. The man who desires without pause. The man who precipitates the war to end all wars. It grants him paradise and the admiration of the gods. In the desiring and the doing this most reviled of men fulfils the mandate of man. You must know the world before you are done with it. You must act on desire before you renounce it. There can be no merit in forgoing the not known. The greatest book in the world rescues volition from religion and gives it back to man. Religion is the disciplinarian fantasy of a schoolmaster. The Mahabharata is the joyous song of life of a maestro. In its tales within tales it takes religion for a spin and skins it inside out. Leaves it puzzling over its own poisoned follicles. It gives men the chance to be splendid. Doubt-ridden architects of some small part of their lives. Duryodhanas who can win even as they lose.

He floods the house with music that shook the world a hundred years ago. His fingers knot over complicated patterns and his thumbs fail when he needs them most. But, the Maestro's wrath aside, he owes it to the music to find perfection.

If he stretches to care about something else – like what the Maestro thinks of him or how he fails at school or what he really wants to do with his life – he’ll be pulled too thin. His skin will part like old paper and the world will see how his skeleton is made of dark wishes and macabre dreams. They’ll know his heart thumps to the beat of the Maestro’s metronome because it’s too scared to do otherwise. But worst? They’ll see the emptiness inside him.

I could set from memory a replica of the perfect Still Life she laid out on the table each morning: the carefully folded Advertiser, the two canary yellow hemispheres of grapefruit in their bowls, separated by a more richly yellowed cube of butter; the sky blue milk-jug and matching sugar bowl filled to the brim with their differently textured whitenesses; the pot of tea snug in its knitted navy blue cosy, the steam that rose invisibly from its spout suddenly rendered visible, swirling, where it entered the slanting morning light.

If your life could be transcribed into a song, the rights and wrongs, the ups and downs, the good and the bad, and the periods of turmoil and challenges, as much as the moments in which you felt high in the clouds, in love, in awe for all the good things happening to you, mesmerized with disbelief for the joys you were experiencing, all those things would be just and only sounds, perfectly arranged to formulate your own song, the song of your life. In the same way, you must see your friends, and enemies, and loved ones and strangers. For everything is made of frequencies, and everything comes to you in precise moments, to match other frequencies. Everything that happens to you is in a perfect arrangement of vibrations and coincidences. And the maestro of this song is you. You are creating all of that with your mind.

France is the country of constrained perfection. It cannot rise to the categories of supra-culture: the sublime, the tragical, the massively-aesthetical. That’s why it could never and will never produce someone like Shakespeare, Bach, or Michelangelo. Compared to them, even Pascal is but a maestro of details, a cobbler of scraps.