Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but when there is no more to take away
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of Le Petit Prince
When I was a child I wanted my name to become a word. A non-noun word. Ideally an adjective as in, “That was so Groat of you!” But I’d take a verb “I totally just Groated x”. I had no idea what I wanted my name to mean. Just that I wanted it to transcend being a name and become part of our cultural dictionary. Like how Kafka gave us ‘Kafkaesque’, which means a work of fiction that is nightmarishly complex and illogical. Or whatever the pretentious douche bag in a coffee shop needed it to mean for his sentence to make sense. That’s the prestige I wanted.
I remember wanting power. I dreamed of picking up a phone and starting or ending wars. I used to fantasize about redrawing maps because a head of state displeased me. I wanted to speak and have my words be made law.
I imagined enormous feasts. Huge amounts of all of my favourite foods. I’d never eat it all of course, I just wanted to know that my supply was limitless. I’d let the people around me have what was left
I wanted a lot of things.
Recently, however, I stumbled upon the above quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery and began to wonder what I could take away. I got rid of clothes that I didn’t enjoy wearing or felt looked good. This allowed me to build a ‘perfect’ wardrobe without spending an additional extra cent. I started taking unhealthy foods, sugars and carbs out of my diet. This gave me a ‘perfect’ diet without forcing me to break the bank on ‘superfoods’.
After awhile I made a discovery. Many of my dreams and desires weren’t truly about acquiring excess. They were about removing something negative.
I didn’t crave power. I wanted to be fearless
I didn’t want vast feasts. I just wanted to never be hungry
And I realized that a greater legacy would be as a man who removes words from the dictionary. Rather then having his name make a single entry.
Imagine how we would praise the individuals or groups who removed ‘hunger’ from the dictionary? Or ‘inequality’ or ‘poverty’ or illiteracy’? Imagine the prestige these individuals would wield
I’ve decided that I know longer want to become an adjective or a verb. I want to be a part of a group of individuals who tries to take dangerous words away.
And if by some unforeseeable turn of fate I do end up immortalized in a dictionary. Then I hope that ‘Groat’ comes to mean ‘one who is made complete by absence’
Please comment below on what words you’d want to have forever removed from our dictionary if you had the power. What you think you could remove from your life to be made whole.
Specialization is for Insects 