The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

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

We usually expand our capacities without changing our lives. People go off to meditation retreats and come back to their Manhattan existence; on the whole, they are not more serene, but they are much more knowing about where serenity might yet be found. People go to cooking school and don’t cook more; but they know how to cook.

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

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

The master magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it’s a trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person’s ability to let the trickery go on. Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew

Blaine still works intently on card tricks, of the more avant-garde kind that derive from the great Spanish magician Juan Tamariz, whom all magicians today, on all sides, uncritically revere.

the experience of mastery lengthens time: by making each step fully self-conscious, we live within the moment as we otherwise rarely do. The attempt to banish distraction, which we try and fail to achieve in meditation, for instance, happens unbidden in kneading dough or practicing scales or making tilts in time. Our interiority is stretched like s

We make ourselves in our father’s sunlight but also in his shadow: what he beams down we bend away from.

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.