I’m currently reading Return to the Whorl, the concluding volume of Gene Wolfe’s fascinating (albeit sometimes difficult) Book of the Short Sun — the concluding volume, in fact, of his so-called “Solar Cycle.” This evening, while waiting for my train home, I came across this passage, which, in typical Wolfe fashion, appears to have many different layers of meaning — not least of all as an interesting description of the process of writing:
I should go back and line out my mistake, I suppose, but I hate lining things out — it gives the page such an ugly appearance. Besides, to line out is to accept responsibility for the correctness of all that is let stand. To correct that or any other error would be to invite you to ask me (when you read this, as I hope you soon will) why I failed to correct some other. And I cannot correct all or even most of them without tearing the whole account to shreds and starting again. My new account, moreover, would be bound to be worse than this, since I could not prevent myself from attributing to myself knowledge an opinions I did not have at the time the events I recorded occurred. No, there really are such things as honest mistakes; this account is full of them, and I intend to leave it that way.