Culture January 1, 1

As every published writer learns, the regrets of authorship come to matter more: Time’s passage qualifies the enormity of our misdeeds, but our misjudgments, enshrined in print, assume a treacherous immortality, testifying to our fallibility not simply after we are silent but in theory until the day mankind is engulfed in analphabetic extinction. All it takes is one blatant rhyme to betray the elliptical poet, one cheap anachronism to corrupt convincing historical fiction—and one alluring but unsubstantiated anecdote to compromise eternally the scrupulous reconstructions of the biographer.