Back in primary school, I was always inclined against lending my erasers to my classmates. And they probably thought I was being selfish. But it was merely that I had my principles.
You know, I still enjoy running my finger over the clean-cut regularity of a new eraser's edge. It is a delightful feeling, is the unfettered sharpness of such edges. It always reminded me of completeness, wholeness, pristine perfection. It was something like a crisp, blank sheet of paper; or else a glass of water standing perfectly still, full almost to the brim, without loose droplets clinging limply to its sloping sides; or maybe a newborn baby unadulterated by the delusions of the world. To an eight-year-old, this was so joyful.
Sometimes I reflect with pity that the things of the world disfigure themselves in service of the purposes for which they were ordained. White sheets of paper must forcibly be vandalised by ink, lines and coffee stains; water must slosh against the sides of the glass, and deplete itself, en route to a man's penis; and we must live. It was something of a wrench to apply an eraser to use for the first time. (Well, everything hurts the first time; just ask those who're* losing their virginity.) Reluctantly, hesitantly, slowly, delaying the moment as long as I could, my eight-year-old fingers would gently press the prized eraser against the surface of my worksheet, hoping to minimise the visible damage it incurred.
And always, I made sure to use only the same corner of the eraser. I wanted to leave the other three intact as far as possible, notwithstanding how being knocked around with the other stuff in my pencil case invariably made them marginally less perfect. Such efforts left my eraser, which started out as rectangular slabs, with an odd shape that resembled, more and more with time, a quadrant. I liked it that way.
Usually, I never got far with shaping my erasers into quadrants. People always intervened. They always remarked that my eraser came in a funny shape - but obviously not funny enough for it to be worth keeping. They would borrow it, peer at it for a split-second, and then proceed to erase whatever it was on their sheets with which they were unhappy. They would start with one of my unblemished corners, and rub vigorously for a mere few seconds. Then they would give a short sigh or exhalation, and apply another sharp corner to the erasing of a finer point or detail that eluded them the first time. Satisfied, they would return the eraser to me with a smile, and perhaps a cheerful "Thank you!" I never shared their enthusiasm for destroying perfection, but I never told them so either. Hiding my feelings and being emotionally opaque are not new traits to me, you see.
A substantial proportion of you will call me irrational, ludicrous, or a lunatic for this. And quite frankly, I don't care. I choose to find your pragmatic preoccupation with achieving end results (at the expense of a pretty eraser) equally misguided. Just because one wishes to rub off a tiny corner of a diagram without obliterating the useful bits of it, one irreversibly spoils the sanctity of an eraser's corner. He also disrespects the perfection whose preservation has been the preoccupation of a tender soul. And to be oblivious to this - to notice the eraser's shape is odd but not realise that it is deliberately and wilfully so, and should therefore be left as such - reeks of tactlessness and insensitivity.
When you next see me rubbing away with the blunt edge of an eraser, I am not insisting on doing things the hard way, but merely preserving what little morsels of perfection we haven't yet soiled with traces of our endeavours. You - that is, the world with its collective nag - may ask: What's wrong with trying to achieve the best using what we have, sacrificing the unblemished sanctity of numerous items in the quest to create one perfect composite? Well, you may not succeed; nobody guarantees that your best efforts are positive. Sometimes, perfection is meant to be received, not achieved, bequeathed, and not won. And that's all there is.
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* Any seeming similarity to other words is fully unintentional and acknowledged only in retrospect.
