For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.

My father enjoyed finding errors in published books. He read a lot of books in retirement, many pertaining to history, and he was always thrilled to catch mistakes that slipped by the watchful eyes of authors and editors. I don’t know what pleased him so much about this — perhaps the feeling of being smarter than some egghead academic. I remember that when I handed him a copy of my own academic monograph, on Romantic-era epic literature, I told him, “When you find errors in here, I need you not to tell me about them because I don’t think I can emotionally handle it.”

My amusing comment might even suggest a kind of Oedipal dynamic at work for me, where the father correcting the mistakes of the son is experienced as a threat, an echo of the energies that Freud finds in childhood and the unconscious mind.

But, since we all make mistakes, it doesn’t help to run from them. Errors are, Joyce tells us in Ulysses, “portals of discovery” for the “man of genius,” as I’ve written about here. I recently said in conversation that Stephen Dedalus is wrong when he says this, but I was overstating the case. What I meant was that Stephen desperately wants to believe this comment because he’s running from his mistakes. I’m not sure Stephen understands the best version of what his words might mean.

Mistakes are inevitable, so long as we have a human brain that must navigate the world by assembling a picture of it that is faulty to greater or lesser degrees. How can one embrace error, and accept fallibility, without unduly obsessing over one’s mistakes? Read on for a further discussion of the value of mistakes, and a discussion of my own embarrassing typographical errors in publication!