I am embarrassed.
There is no other way of putting it, I have made an unfortunate blunder.
Hopefully, nobody has been hurt by my mistake, and I have certainly learned something from it.
Perhaps it is a common mistake when we are presented with so much information at our fingertips.
Put simply, we must learn to distinguish fact from that which we are seeking.
This phenomenon is not new. It has even been given, incorrectly I believe, a name in a recent Hollywood film.
The da Vinci Code, and it was used to describe the facility that we have to see what we wish to see. Or what we are looking for.
In that film it was called schotoma, which is more accurately defined as the capacity our eyes possess for seeing what we wish to see.
My understanding of it is that we have a blind spot at the back of each of our eyes, where the optic nerve goes from the eye to the brain.
But none of us has an obvious part of our vision that is simply blank, although it is possible to discover this blank spot by simply moving something visible across our eyes until it disappears briefly.
In other words, millions of years of evolution have made it helpful for the brain to be able to fill in this gap in our vision, so that we appear to be able to see continuously.
How this blind spot has recently confused me is in the creation of my most recent blog entry, when I mistakenly believed that I had discovered from an online newspaper story that there had been a recent earthquake in Italy, frankly because I didn’t read the information on my computer screen correctly.
What I had done is found the article published in 1997 about the earthquake that badly affected Assisi and northern Italy more generally, but I had failed to appreciate that this was in fact an article written in 1997, mainly because at the top of the page, quite naturally, the online newspaper published yesterday’s date.
The date of the article, written in 1997, was in smaller type further down the page.
Because I had been undertaking research for my current writing project, sacred places, I had failed to appreciate this fact, and I believed briefly, that in fact there had been an earthquake in northern Italy on 7 February.
In some respects, this was entirely because if there had been such an event, it would have suited the purposes of my story perfectly.
It was a case of seeing what I wanted to see, because I had not checked carefully what precisely the article in fact reported.
Fortunately, I did that this morning, and so I can publish my sense of embarrassment, and talk about what I have learned from my failure to read fully and properly what I had taken for granted when my Internet search revealed something useful for me.
This is a useful lesson for anyone using the Internet regularly for research, and I am sure that everybody can give examples of where they have read something that they have interpreted as fact without questioning whether it is in fact fact at all.
There is no doubt that the Internet and the information age is a great boon to all of us that have access to it, but it is important to realise that it is easy to be misled, and not only by the actual content of an article, but by failing to appreciate its true context.
Hopefully I will not make the same mistake again. In terms of my characters about to visit the town of Assisi in Umbria, I may well use this experience creatively, perhaps making my central character experience a realistic dream that matches with what I briefly thought was the case.
Who knows. This is the nature of creative writing, it is up to the reader to be careful to always judge whether they are reading something that is truthful or indeed designed to mislead.
The only positive thing that I can rescue from my embarrassment he is what I have learned about how gullible I can be, and I will certainly be more alert to the genuine context of what I am reading in future.
Perhaps my last words in this article should be an apology to anyone that has read my previous blog article, and even for a moment, believed that it may have been true.
It wasn’t, it was my mistake. I was wrong. And I am embarrassed by it, even though it may well serve a useful creative purpose in the end.
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