The beauty
of a prime number.

There are two ways to make a beautiful thing.

The first is to take away. You begin with something whole, and you remove — the excess, the unnecessary, the noise — until nothing is left that could be taken without breaking it. This is the beauty of subtraction. The world tends to call it the higher art: the empty room, the single line, the unadorned. Less, we are told, is more.

I believe in this beauty. I have built my life's work upon it.

But there is a second way. And I am reminded of it, every time I walk into a pâtisserie in Paris.

Let me tell you, first, what I do — so that you understand what I mean by subtraction.

My work is the body. And every treatment, in the end, is a stimulus — and a stimulus, however gentle, is also a kind of damage. The more hands you lay on a body, the more it accumulates, layer upon layer, like noise drowning out a signal. So my entire art is aimed at one thing: to drive that damage as close to zero as it will go. To find the root — the single true cause — and to address only that. The necessary touch, given minimally, neither too much nor too little.

It is, perhaps, not so different from seasoning. A dish oversalted cannot be unsalted. So you learn to add one pinch, exactly, and stop. To remove everything that is not essential, until what remains is almost — one. A single, irreducible thing.

That is the beauty I serve.
The beauty of approaching one.