Agostino was fired. The block was abandoned. It sat there, on its side, getting rained on, hailed on, fouled by birds, for more than 30 years. After a while, it became a fixed part of the landscape of Florence. People and buildings changed all around it, regimes rose and fell, but the monumental block never moved. Residents began to call it, with some mixture of respect and mockery, “the Giant.”

I didn’t get back to Florence, after my initial visit, for nearly 20 years. When I did finally return, it was as an adult man on the brink of middle age. I was not quite 40 but felt, in many ways, older. My hair, once as heroically thick as the David’s, had begun to thin visibly, and I felt sad about this, and I also considered my sadness to be its own failure, because I wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t care about superficial, middle-age things. Every morning, when I stepped out of bed, my joints hurt, especially my ankles, which a doctor had recently diagnosed with arthritis — they were 20 years older than the rest of me, he said.

My youthful pursuit of David-like perfection had gone, shall we say, not terribly well. I had turned out to be a strange person, not anything like an ideal. My life was littered with awkwardnesses, estrangements, mutual disillusionments, abandoned projects. Recently, I had begun to notice an odd tic in my interpersonal style — a problem with my gaze. I would be speaking with someone, a friend or a shopkeeper, all very normally (how are you good thanks how are you how’s your summer), and then, for no discernible reason, my eyes would dart away from my interlocutor, urgently, right over one of his or her shoulders, and the shift would be so sudden that the person would whip his or her head around to see what on earth I was looking at — a policeman or an exotic bird or a runaway train — but it would turn out that there was nothing there at all. My gaze had been flicked away by a little spasm of social discomfort. And so the person would look back at me, confused, and I would manage to hold his or her gaze for another few seconds until the social energy built back up between us to an intolerable level, at which point I would suddenly break the circuit again by looking away — and the person would look, one more time, back over his or her shoulder to confirm that nothing was there, and then our relationship would be altered forever.

Perfection, it turns out, is no way to try to live. It is a child’s idea, a cartoon — this desire not to be merely good, not to do merely well, but to be faultless, to transcend everything, including the limits of yourself. It is less heroic than neurotic, and it doesn’t take much analysis to get to its ugly side: a lust for control, pseudofascist purity, self-destruction. Perfection makes you flinch at yourself, flinch at the world, flinch at any contact between the two. Soon what you want, above all, is escape: to be gone, elsewhere, annihilated.

By the time I returned to Florence, I had grown accustomed to spending solid weeks in a state of high anxiety — my hands would turn freezing, like a corpse, and I would sit at my desk wishing I could cry, and my wife would tell me, with increasing urgency, that she was afraid I was going to have a heart attack. Eventually, after many years of this, I was prescribed a daily pill intended to stabilize an imbalance in my brain chemistry, and this solution has worked, more or less. Yet I am still plagued by this eccentricity of the loads: an impossible tension between the fantasies in my head and the realities on the ground.

And so, on my bad ankles and with my broken gaze, I returned to see the David. Things in Florence seemed essentially the same. Crowds still waited for hours in the brutal heat to enter the churchlike museum. Inside, the David stood exactly as I last saw him. I experienced the same moment of revelation: the sudden improbability of his size, his excellence. He still dominated the space, still held the light on his impossibly subtle musculature. In fact, he was looking better than ever, because in the intervening years he had been cleaned, millimeter by millimeter, at great expense and with some controversy — the grit and dust of 500 years scrubbed off. The marble seemed to glow. Once again, my brain reached for the word “perfect.”

But “perfect” no longer seemed adequate. Although I couldn’t see the cracks inside the David’s ankles and legs, I knew they were there. I knew other things too: that the marble of his face was pocked with holes, for instance, which restorers had filled in, and that he was missing a small chip of stone from one of his lower eyelids, and that his right little toe had been lost multiple times, and that a crazy man had taken a hammer to his left foot in 1991. Although the David’s maladies were mostly patched up over the centuries, you could still see all the scars.