H.L.  Mencken once said that when he reached middle age that what he wanted to encounter most in life was competence—simple competence. “From A to Z” he quipped, “From A as in adultery to Z as in zoology and everything in between.” Well, we can hope he was exaggerating about the adultery and he probably was not that interested in zoology, but he makes an excellent point.

I came to Mencken as a reading assignment in high school and I sensed that he was a bit of a snob, he nonetheless quickly became a lingusitic hero of mine. He was a master at poking at the truly pretentious and his phrasing and barbed wit elevated what otherwise would have merely been irreverent commentary to a sophisticated art form.

In the 1920s he founded The Onion of its day—a magazine chock full of equally irreverent writers called The American Mercury. Although mischievous, he was truly an intelligent champion of free speech and the press. In fact, more than once he put his name, reputation, and a good deal of his own money on the line defense of these ideals. Sadly, history revealed many of Menken’s other thoughts to be rather distateful and I certainly distance myself from him in that regard. Sad when a high-school hero turns out to not be all that you had imagined.

Mencken, Ambrose Bierce, and Mark Twain are the triumvirate of Americans who, in their very own way, could match the greatness of the English wits and satirists like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Twain, of course, was uniquely American in all aspects while Bierce formed his voice through the horrifying combat he saw in the American Civil War.

Bierce’s wit had a wry edge of cynicism to it—we only need to think of his notation is his Devil’s Dictionary (a misplaced name for a brilliant piece of fun-poking) that “love is a disease that is cured only by marriage.” Mencken in turn, took a completely different tack with his words although his target was a ripe one: human nature. So when he said that he wished for competence we feel his pain. I can only wonder what he would have said after a lengthy spell on hold with customer support.

Men like to pretend to adhere to an unwritten code of manhood that says that they can never admit to being scared or intimidated by something. They can, however, fess up to being unsettled and that is what I am doing when I say that I am unsettled by those who take Mencken’s quest for competence too far—in other words, they try to be absolutely perfect.

Take Japan for example. For all its beauty, it has often unsettled me. Not in an outright bad way as I brim with appreciation and awe at what there is to see there. But it does overwhelm me. Not only is the Japanese language a high hurdle for all but the most linguistically gifted (3 alphabets and a cracking hard intonation to master), but the quest for perfection in so many areas of life can be, at least at first, deeply unnerving.

Even though just an average Joe, I had the opportunity to work and live there for a time and it was a nothing if not a constant reminder of my mere mortality. Steve Jobs is reputed to have said that most people have never worked within groups that are striving toward excellence and that they therefore would not recognize it. I think that maybe he would have had a different opinion had he spent some time in Japan.

Take the simple sartorial exercise of getting dressed every day that most of us go through as we get ready for work… not too formal but never sloppy. However, in Japan, I noticed that every businessman or even casual dresser seemed to have trousers that were exactly the right length—never a touch too short from frequent dry cleanings like the rest of us (particularly me I am embarrassed to say). Nor, of course, were they ever a millimeter too long. Every shirt was perfectly fitted, every tie perfectly dimpled, every hair in place. Extend that out in daily life. Every action of the hotel staff was just right, every meal cooked to perfection. Was this a movie set? I tried pretty hard to get into the groove but I simply could not keep pace. It scared… oops, I mean it unsettled me. I felt like a runner who is already behind the others even before the starting gun sounds.

Nor is it just Japan that can make the ordinary chap backpedal a bit. Even looking at the Weekend Journal section of the Wall Street Journal can be a bit atmospheric at times with its discussions of lives that are not, nor ever will be, ours. To go one better, the Financial Times (FT) from London has an over-achieving travel writer by the name of Tyler Brûlé (Not sure if his sister is named Crème) who reports to his well-heeled London readership on the best of this and the best of that.

Tyler seemingly eats, shops, and generally hangs out in pretty much all the perfect places with all the right people. To me, his columns have a whiff of inclusionary yet exclusionary charm that yes, we as the readers could be part of this lifestyle except that most of us are not. Reminds me of Groucho Marx’s quip about not wanting to be a member of any club that would have him as a member!

In 25 years of solid international travel as a pilot I still do not have any idea how to plop down in a major city and figure out where the coolest places are. I have often wondered if these writers don’t just do like I do when I land on foreign soil: Go for a run in the park, grab something to eat, and then try to sleep off the jet lag.

Where then is the line between doing our best and working toward excellence and an unending quest for perfection? What is perfection? Was Steve Jobs right in saying that we might not recognize it even if we met it? If we did, what would we do with it? Maybe H.L. Mencken can help us here. I bet that Mencken would say that while we should work toward competence and be delighted when we achieve it, we probably do not really want perfection. Perfection, he might argue, can be sterile, scary, and perhaps just too uncomfortable for everyday life.

Psychologists and artists agree that human eyes and the brain need imperfections and irregularities in our visual environment to allow them to capture the texture and meaning of what we see. These are called perturbations and they give our eyes and mind a foothold to interpret the rest of the “scene”—almost always processed unconsciously of course. It is a fun thought experiment to think of how many things in life we enjoy because there is variation in what we see or experience. While we want the perfect surgeon, do we really want a life where 95% of one’s energy is expended pursuing the last 5% of perfection? Wouldn’t that landscape look a bit barren?

W e as average folk often get sidetracked in our pursuit of the ever elusive perfection that we sense to be just over the horizon. When we do, we lose sight of just how rewarding, and indeed fun, sheer competence is. Mencken appreciated competence as a thing of beauty in its own right. He could have just as easily watched a skilled mechanic repair a bicycle or a statesman giving an address before the Senate. The reward comes in something done well, not in a perfection that might not even exist in the first place.

The great British historian Paul Johnson related a story from his childhood in which his mother showed him the best way to wash and dry dishes. After some weeks of toil, she finally gave her blessing and promoted him to foreman of the kitchen duty. A silly game between mother and child you might think, but nearly eight decades later Johnson still thought of the lesson that no task is menial. That he later went on to Oxford and became one of the great practitioners of the English language but still remembers this story reflects his appreciation for competence in all he did.

The German writer and arching intellectual Ernst Jünger once related how, as a new Lieutenant in the trenches in WWI, a group of coal miners showed him that to dig a proper trench one must start by digging deep at first and letting the earth fall in—thus saving a lot of work. It was a good lesson for the comfortably-born Jünger as it taught him that these colliers had perhaps many more tricks and skills up their sleeves that would help him survive service at the front.

Although one prefers not to have to make use of the underground lavatories in London’s Hyde Park, such is the call of nature at times. One evening as I was out for a jog I had that urgent need. At nearly 10 p.m. I ducked down the one on the southeast corner called Hyde Park Corner. Not 800 meters from Buckingham Palace and a stone’s throw from new condos that cost tens of millions of dollars, I was amazed at how clean it was. Attended by a West African immigrant who was preparing it for closing, it simply gleamed.

Cleaning toilets in one of the world’s richest and most glamorous cities—within minutes from the world’s longest reigning monarch? No, I have no illusion that work like this and poverty have any glamour. In fact, it I have no doubt that this man wished to be doing something else. Yet the pride that he took in his task was obvious—he was doing his best and doing it very well.

Unfortunately, rather sadly actually, this man’s pride and dedication will not net him much monetarily, but his competence was humbling and it brought me up short as I thought how I approach the things that I do. Mencken surely would have reflected on it as well: Not perfection, but instead a deep well of competence that reflects one of the underlying pleasures of life. It does not require great gifts or talents. It does not require talk of the perfect this and the perfect that. Instead it allows those perturbations and irregularities to come to the fore and that is exactly where life is lived. It is there that lie the true treasures in life. 

In the meantime, Stay Average!

March 2018