Faux Pas

The proofs of my book have arrived and I know now my book is an ungainly thing. Some passages are, it is true, reasonable. They have a momentum, a direction, and the phrases are well turned. But others – especially the ones I hastily added when I came close to the deadline – are like great swamps in which all forward movement is lost. I think of the scene in Tarkovsky’s Mirror in which soliders trudge across a marsh. It is clearly a book which languished too long and, when I finally received a contract, was subjected to a rewrite which confused the original argument. Still, if the original book had been published as I had written it, it would have been terrible, an embarassment. This way, it is merely a false step.