You need the contrast

From The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason, page 81. The protagonist Elendur Sveinsson is in conversation with a detective colleague who has lived a successful life and prospered but is regarded as lazy and unimaginative by his colleagues.

Erlendur looked at him, his tasteful clothes and his manicured nails, and wondered whether a happy life made people even more boring than they were to start with.

Somehow this seems to resonate with this recent article by David Owen, Scars: A Life in Injuries, well worth a read.

Owen makes the point, that the body is a canvas with the daubs and smears of its own history. Here is the scar on my cheek from the time I ran through a glass door in Nigeria; here is the scar on my forehead, a consequence of a fall from a steamroller when I was four years old in Venezuela; this almost invisible scar above my right eyebrow? Walking into the edge of a closing door while rushing between classes in grad school; all these scars on the knuckles? Enthusiastic but barely competent fencing in high school. The list goes on; a whole catalogue of stories, some remembered sharply, others a vague recollection.

Over the years, your body becomes a kind of historical document, in which certain dramatic moments are memorialized in scar tissue. There’s a blemish on my left arm that was caused by a dollop of molten G.I. Joe—the artifact of experiments that my friends and I conducted, in grade school, on the melting points of our possessions. On my right arm, I have two similar marks, made by metal pins that a surgeon inserted on either side of a broken wrist, when I was in college. (After the pins were out and the cast was off, I showed the surgeon that I couldn’t bend my right wrist as much as my left. He tapped the right wrist and said, “This is normal. The other one bends too much.”)

The connection between these two texts is the observation that the body and the mind are always a testament to some past, some parts seen in the form of scars, other parts perhaps not seen but discerned in patterns of behavior. The person with an easy and untroubled history, if there is such a person, is likely to have fewer scars, seen or unseen, and is therefore perhaps, as Indridason indicates, more boring. I am not sure but it does seem to me that much of what is interesting about others is something beyond their successes. Success without at least some scars, seen or unseen, perhaps is too bland - you need the contrast.