Working Within Limits

In a recent post about Hungarian education I brought up “the possibility of doing good, creating something worthwhile and beautiful, even within limitations.” I would like to take up this topic more generally. It can mean many different things, so I will try to tease apart some of the meanings.

First of all, we work within limits by necessity, since we are mortal and have limits to our strength, energy, skill, and knowledge. Yes, we can transcend the limits at times, but the limits remain. An “immortal” composition does not make the composer immortal. To make something beautiful, important, or lasting is to contend with passing away.

Second, we might work within limits of form: a song, a sonnet, a play. Flexible and changeable as the form might be, it still lays out a terrain and borders for us. We can cross the borders, move them, stand on both sides of them, pretend to ignore them; in speaking to the border, we raise up something from the center, some essential image, action, or sound.

Third, we continually work within the limits of circumstance: the imperfections of our dwellings, institutions, employment, income, countries, world. No one has ideal conditions for a long time. Something interrupts them: a war, a disease, a change of administration, an unforeseen expense, a new law. But even the most severe situational limits cannot prevent good things from being done and made, at least in the mind.

Fourth (related to the first), we have limits in the mind. We work from our particular view of the world, which is unlike anyone else’s. The trick is to seize it and find its rhythms, while also letting it change over time.

Fifth, we have limits of relation. Our friends and colleagues are special precisely because they cannot do and be everything for us. What they cannot do is as important as what they can. A person can do more for others when able to say no to certain things. One of the greatest mistakes in a relationship of any kind is to regard a limit as a rejection. Sometimes it might be, but at other times it steers us toward the actual possibilities. Love (of any kind) comes out of imperfection, a lack of infinity.

Sixth, we have existential and metaphysical limits. We have no idea what this is all for and where it will go. Generation after generation, we face a possible end to the world. We do not know that a good idea or even a good deed lasts forever. It might not even last until tomorrow. It might not even be as good as we think.

I see every one of these limits as a gift. That doesn’t mean I welcome or excuse them all. Some limits in our lives deserve to be broken down or at least vigorously questioned. Protests have their time and place. But without limits, we would become greedier and more sprawling. Even massive novels would be deemed too brief; people would attempt to write infinite stories, which I would not want to read. School would never end. (The virtues of “lifelong learning” aside, formal schooling should end at some point.) Marathons would take so long that spectators would abandon them and go about their day. There would be nothing transcendent, since there would be nothing to transcend.

Education has to do, in part, with learning to perceive, understand, and grapple with limits of different kinds. Without the limits, there would be nothing to learn.