Rain

"For the rain it raineth every day."

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

I don’t exactly wear out my television set. Except for NHL hockey games and English Premier League football, practically the only time I turn the set on is to watch Hockey Central, a Sportsnet Canada talk show broadcast in the US on the NHL Network. One of the hosts of the show, Jeff Marek, likes to proclaim that “the good is the enemy of the great.”*

Now, Marek is not wrong; when one is content with what is good enough, one stops striving for what is the best or ultimate or ideal or perfect.

But the reverse is also true; the great is the enemy of the good. Here is a letter of mine that was published in Science News (July24, 1999): 

Better early than never

I have two comments to add to the fine article about making decisions based upon less-than-total knowledge, "Simple minds, smart choices" (SN: 5/29/99, p. 348). It quite aptly starts off citing former big leaguer and current baseball analyst Tim McCarver on the need to go with one's first instinct. I wish to add McCarver's famous dictum: "Think long, think wrong."

The second comment I would like to cite is an old military adage about making choices under pressure and time constraints: "A good plan now is better than a perfect plan later."

Harold Gotthelf Jersey City, N.J.

Think about being part of a military unit trapped by your enemy. You are going to try to formulate a plan of escape. After considering the alternatives, are you willing to reject a good plan in hope that the perfect plan will fall into place later? You might be wiped out before that opportunity arises. 

Gregers Werle in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck makes it his life’s mission to advocate for “the claim of the ideal.” In doing so, he destroys the satisfactory middling life of the bumbling Hialmar Ekdal, and, more importantly, causes the death of his daughter. 

Beware of the peddlers of the Ideal. They may just be selling death.

                                                          *                

Annie may sing that 

The sun'll come out

Tomorrow.

But Annie is a child. Adults know that life is filled with obstacles and compromises, and that even by exerting all one’s effort in an attempt to achieve greatness one will not reach the ideal or the perfect. 

Thus adults sing,

Well, the sun went down

And tomorrow brought us rain.

(Count Basie & Jimmy Rushing)

*

Jeff Marek also often quotes John Maynard Keynes:

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

*

Grab the good when it comes. 

For another Keynes saying is:

In the long run we are all dead.

***

* I know that I discussed this in an earlier blog, but for the life of me, I can’t locate it.