Well, it's not perfect, but what is?
As I was playing, I was thinking about an article I read recently about the great memorization debate. I was looking at the music occasionally, but not really reading it... when you really learn a piece, you get to a place where the music looks *different* somehow. Like, obviously it's the same music, but it's been transmuted. It's not just a bunch of notes, it's a structure. And looking at that structure helps me play it. I guess I'm remembering the piece in 'chunks' rather than notes. This is how I was admonished to practice way back when, too -- learn chunks of the piece, separately, and be able to play them on demand. That's what I rediscovered on the last piece, when I stopped trying to do the whole thing every day and broke it down into halves. On harder variations, I may need to do even less, quarters even.
The above leads to the interesting thought: is there a level of knowing a piece above chunk-wise? Like, the way I see measures and phrases as unitary wholes, are there musicians who see entire pieces (or pages) that way? Anecdotal evidence points to yes: I read recently about musicians in long-running Broadway shows who read novels during their performance. I'm pretty sure I've never been there on any classical piece, but I suspect there are Queen songs that I knew on that level, at least for a while. Performing on stage, I focused a lot on tiny tiny details that had very little, if anything, to do with the notes I was playing. I think that's because I learned those songs mostly as chord progressions; a chunk of chord progressions basically *is* a song. So.
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