"Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?"

Brautigan turns perfection into a joke with a sharp philosophical edge: the only things that never break, disappoint, or betray are the places where nothing exists. Perfection, under this logic, is not an achievement but an absence. If a flaw is a deviation from a standard, then the surest way to avoid flaws is to remove the standard and the thing measured by it, erase the object, the event, the desire. The cosmic void becomes an immaculate showroom: no stains because no furniture; no failures because no attempts.

The humor hides a critique of perfectionism. When life is present, love, work, art, politics, complication arrives with it. Goals collide, bodies age, plans misfire. A thirst for faultlessness can become a hunger for control so tight that it suffocates what it means to live. Zero defects can be achieved by doing nothing. No heartbreak occurs if you never care. No bad art is made if you never write. The price of risklessness is vacancy.

There’s also cosmic humility here. On the grandest scales, the universe’s most “perfect” neighborhoods are vast, cold voids where we cannot exist. If our standard for the best possible condition is the absence of anything that can go wrong, then the apex of order lies far from human thriving. That mismatch exposes the absurdity of our craving for purity; it mistakes sterility for grace.

Yet the line also echoes older traditions that find clarity in emptiness: the quiet mind, the negative space that gives form to a painting, the silence that makes music possible. Brautigan’s twist is to stop there and ask whether emptiness should be our ideal. The answer, implied but unspoken, is no. Living requires friction. Meaning grows in the places where things can and do go wrong. Perfect emptiness is safe, and useless. Better the flawed fullness where something happens at all.