Ever play telephone when you were a kid? The game of whispering a saying into one ear and watching it be morphed as it passes through a series of ‘neural networks' - different brains sitting around the kitchen table. The Internet provides a glimpse at this process with quotations as the object of attention. The other day I was putting the finishing edits on my first book (Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness) with co-author Diana Winston, when an astute reader (providing a blurb for the book) noted an error in our reporting of a quote by Henry David Thoreau from Walden. My rendition:
Direct your eyesight inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.
He noted it should read
Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.
WHAT!!!! I used that quote extensively over the last 8 years on many posts, center materials, writings, etc. I had checked it word for word with the text for our book (for commas and other punctuation). How could it be wrong??
Of course in the last day before final edits were due, I couldn't locate my version of Walden (that I had checked for accuracy earlier) so I raced to a local bookstore and bought another. Our astute critic was correct. I had transformed ‘eye right' to ‘eyesight' somewhere in the past and never noticed. (By the way, if you Google it, there are others who have done the same)
A quick search of "Quotation" sites on the Internet gave me great pause to the accuracy of any of them. The range of various versions of the same sentiment afforded famous individuals can be quite extensive. The mutations or changes in text are abundant. To see that on-line is a way to see how words take on a life of their own, shifting and changing through time. And while many variants do not change meaning necessarily, think of how the essence of a quote may change in meaning as well through time with the shifting perspectives from changing cultures and through translations across languages.
In my case, the text read ‘eye right' but my mind preferred eyesight and that's what I read, remembered, and used.
This experience occurred in the minutes of completing a book about mindfulness, the process of becoming more aware of experiences with ‘bare attention' - not one shaded by wants, desires, or our individual conceptual frameworks. Ha! What a humbling reminder that despite my interest in ‘seeing things as they are' my experience is shaded by a long history not easily forgotten.
It is part of our human nature to error because of our attentional biases shaped by culture and memories. It was a brilliant reminder that I will continue to ‘miss things' or ‘see things from my history of experience' regardless of my dedication to practicing mindfulness.
No matter how vast our awareness, there is always more hidden from it.
I may misquote again, although now more sensitive to this issue, perhaps less often. But no doubt I will error again and again. It is through my mindful approach to life that I can recognize these errors with kindness, correct them when I can, and learn what I can from them.
