The Enemy of the Good

“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” wrote Voltaire, usually translated to “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and more often rendered in the imperative as “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” The quote rang in my head recently while on a journalistic junket that had me flying business class to Dubai, which is not how or where I usually fly. We hit some turbulence somewhere over Europe while I passed through the Emirates A380’s spacious bar area on the way to take a piss, so I was asked sternly by the bartender to sit down and buckle up on the couch along with two other guys until the plane stopped bucking, trapped in a modern technological miracle of luxury as well as an awkward social situation. One of them was a sinister-looking, Russian-accented guy with the affect of a businessman or politician. He actually turned out to be really nice. The other was a chubby, underemployed thirtysomething hipster from New York, like me. He wore fine robin’s-egg-blue linen shorts, a matching button-down linen top and designer sneakers. He cut into the conversation I was having with my new friend about my incredulity that I could have a nonalcoholic gin and tonic made for me at 600 mph in an open bar in the sky to ask if we were sitting in business or first. Business, he scoffed? He told us he no longer thinks of business as anything but a sort of inconvenience, even a torture. The sleep is poor. The cabins are so rarely updated. He only flies first.