Low tolerance for good things?

For some time now I’ve been worried that people are liking “nice” less and less and “rotten” (at least in small doses) more and more. [I am not worried that I am too nice. I am worried that the rest of the world will get off the niceness kick and turn more and more icky.]

I have two examples just from this past week. I was discussing the weather yesterday with a friend and he said “it’s too sunny and nice.” I responded with something not so nice, like “you are out of your mind!” But he countered with: “I’m not the only one. I was at a store where the clerks were commenting that they didn’t want to go downtown to the Art Fair because being out in this nice weather was no fun at all.”

In another instance of something that I think is quite related, I heard an NPR interview with an expert on classical guitar. He was talking about Andres Segovia’s charismatic playing and how much it had transformed that instrument into something that could be used in the classical context. I was listening to this with a good deal of interest since I am a fan of Segovia and have a scratchy, much overplayed record of his music.

The person commenting on classical guitar said, however, that in many ways, Segovia has been surpassed; that this generation of classical guitarists plays with a precision that Segovia lacked (if you listen to Segovia, you’ll inevitably pick out the “woosh” oh his shifting hand or the tweak of a string vibration that shouldn’t be there). The NPR person responded – “but that’s no good; isn’t it better if there is a demonstration of human imperfection, so that the piece doesn’t, in fact, come out flawless? There is such a thing as being ‘too good’ at something.”

Of course, my scratchy record hid Segovia’s flaws from me. But I would actually like the scratches not to be there, and listening to snippets from the young guitarists, I liked their ‘overkill on the perfection thing’ just fine. And I like bright weather, nice words and good designs, or at least attempts at getting as close to them as possible.