Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Brautigan

Brautigan’s joke lands because it treats “perfection” as a purely negative space: not an achievement, not a moral state, but the absence of anything that could screw up. The punchline is a deadpan syllogism - if nothing exists, nothing can fail - and it’s funny in the way an emergency exit sign is funny: it’s witty, but it’s also a map of where the author wants to go when the room gets unbearable.

The “huge absolutely empty holes” nod to the era’s popular fascination with astronomy and cosmic scale, a 1970s-tinged moment when science news could sound like metaphysics. Brautigan takes that language and makes it domestic. Suddenly the universe is just a household where mess accumulates; emptiness becomes the only reliable form of order. That’s the subtext: perfection isn’t being reframed as excellence, but as escape.

It also slyly skewers the American self-improvement impulse. We’re trained to imagine perfection as more - more productivity, more clarity, more control. Brautigan flips it: perfection is subtraction taken to the limit. The line carries a gentle nihilism, but not the macho kind; it’s whimsical, almost tender toward the idea that the safest life might be the one you don’t live too intensely.

Underneath the cosmic gag is a writer’s weary pragmatism: most catastrophes require content - ego, desire, plans. Remove the contents, and you remove the risk. That’s not a philosophy that builds civilizations. It’s a philosophy that helps you survive them.