Glacial Errata, No. 1

One: Glacial Erratics

A Glacial Erratic is a type of rock that is separate from the geology surrounding it—something that’s been carried there by glaciers or other ice movement. Formed by ice erosion as it cracks off rocks from a bedrock formation, the rock is frozen into the ice itself as it moves; the ice then carries the erratic some distance before depositing it as the ice recedes. Taken from the Latin errare, “to stray” or “to wander,” the term fascinates me because it suggests both epochal slowness and erratic, sudden movement—an object that serves as a juxtaposition between these two time scales.

Two: A Glacial Erratic from Svalbard

Three: Errata

An Erratum is, simply, a published correction of a text. As The Chicago Manual of Style explains, “Errata, lists of errors and their corrections, may take the form of loose, inserted sheets or bound-in pages. An errata sheet is definitely not a usual part of a book. It should never be supplied to correct simple typographical errors (which may be rectified in a later printing) or to insert additions to, or revisions of, the printed text (which should wait for the next edition of the book). It is a device to be used only in extreme cases where errors severe enough to cause misunderstanding are detected too late to correct in the normal way but before the finished book is distributed. Then the errors may be listed with their locations and their corrections on a sheet that is tipped in, either before or after the book is bound, or laid in loose, usually inside the front cover of the book. (Tipping and inserting must be done by hand, thus adding considerably to the cost of the book.)” 

The erratum’s existence implies a serious issue beyond merely a typo. And so it’s a term that suggests the truth of a text, that it is in a constant (however slight) state of change, of movement—that it contains mistakes, and is constantly provisional.

Taken by itself, the erratum can become a strange kind of poetry.

Four: A Curious List of Errata

Five: José Saramago

I keep coming back to this passage from José Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon (a novel that, as it happens, itself involves an erratum as a plot point).

“There was a full moon, one of those moons that transform the world into a ghostly apparition, when all things, living and inanimate, whisper mysterious revelations, each expressing its own, and all of them discordant, therefore we never come to understand them and suffer the anguish of almost but never quite knowing.”

(translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero)