The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

the greatest card manipulator of our own time, Steve Forte,

three themes seem to spiral out, educating me as they emerged. First, again, that the flow is always a function of fragments, fluid sequences are made of small steps. Separate, discrete actions learned by effort and then put together give not just the illusion of unity but the fact of mastery.

Dan Rocker’s hard-to-learn lesson—that no one really notices even eccentric behavior, that you can mostly follow your star, or your zipper, without raising the eyebrows or attention of the Others, who are following their own—was true here, as it is everywhere.

Keyser Söze

In a recent summing-up essay in Antinomy, Swiss observed

We recognize a work of art, with pleasure, as archaic or antique, only to find ourselves rewarded when it is still able to speak directly to our experience. By “timeless” in that sense, we don’t mean outside time. We mean in two times at once: ours and theirs. What we want from wheels is surely timelessness, but what we want from art is time, time

We live trapped within a self that makes its own dimensions, its own axes, of pleasure and pain. To honor our discomforts at our body’s insistence is to honor our selves. A soul is simply the part that lies within the intersecting axes of pleasure and pain and self-knowledge. It sprays out into the world, if we let it.

what really moves and stirs us is accomplishment, that moment of mastery when suddenly we feel that something profoundly difficult, tenaciously thorny, has given way, and we are now the Master of It, instead of us being mastered by it.

At the heart of the Too Perfect theory is the insight that magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world. Magic is the dramatization of explanation more than it is the engineering of effects. In every art, the Too Perfect theory helps explain why people are more convinced b