The Ideal

Stanley G. Weinbaum was writing about the tyranny of perfect images decades before Instagram, and The Ideal remains unsettlingly prescient. The story follows Dixon Wells, who stumbles into the workshop of the brilliant but eccentric Professor Haskel van Manderpootz and encounters the idealizator: a device that renders thought into visual reality. When Dixon conjures his vision of absolute beauty, he falls desperately in love with the face that appears: the features of de Lisle d'Agrion, a legendary actress dead for a century. The tragedy unfolds as he becomes increasingly absorbed in this impossible romance, neglecting Denise, the living woman who adores him and possesses the very traits he idolizes. When he makes the fatal error of allowing Denise to project her own ideal, the result is catastrophic. What Weinbaum understood, and what this haunting novella illuminates, is that perfection is a kind of death. The ideal is always a corpse. And the pursuit of it destroys what is real, present, and capable of loving us back.