Imperfection, Humans, Nature, Glow in the Dark Cats … Life and Death

            We all feel a need to be perfect; however, we often mistakenly pursue ideas of perfection warped by the perception of human society.  Nature provides a myriad of examples of human attempts to make perfect that which they see as imperfect.  Take the recent idea of glow-in-the-dark cats: humans thought something natural was imperfect, and so they decided to change it. 

I remember being struck years ago by a quote in a book called The Roar, when a character notes how “whenever humans tried to imitate nature,” they got it wrong.  Specifically, the character was contemplating a plate with a leaf shape repeating around the edge; the same leaf every time, perfectly symmetrical, without blemishes – the leaf represented not nature in its natural state, but nature influenced intentionally by humans.

While glowing cats seem strange to us for now, some attempts at human “perfection” have been accepted for so long that we don’t even consider them to be altering nature anymore.  For example, drugs allowing us to live longer lives past when we would otherwise die – not fully natural.  Eyeglasses, hearing aids, sleeping pills; none of these common objects were around before modern civilization started on a dangerous quest to eliminate imperfections.  Keeping everyone alive and well, doing our best to fight natural selection – thus interfering with adaptation and long-term evolution - we have been, by some theories, weakening our gene pool by allowing the weak to survive past what would have been their times to die. 

Why do we do this – fight death, alter life?

We humans often see death as imperfect, so we seek to correct it.  Septimus, however, when he jumps out the window in Mrs. Dalloway, thinks “It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s” (Woolf 149).  Death is a tragedy in that it takes a loved one from us, ending that specific bit of beauty on earth – but, as Septimus sees when he achieves mental clarity, death is also natural.  As Richard tells Clarissa before his suicide in the movie The Hours, there is a time to “let go,” “so [we] can be free.”  When Virginia’s husband asks in The Hours why someone must die in the book, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia is writing, she replies “So that the rest of us can value life more.”  It is life’s ephemeral (Ms. Valentino’s high-diction word for “passing”) nature that makes it so worth living.