Stephen Baker

I spent quite a lot of my writing time yesterday hunting down a quote and making some unexpected discoveries. If you’re interested in how much time it takes to be accurate, and/or intrigued by how AI can actually be used to improve human writing, read on. It does get a bit technical, but that’s part of the job. My hunt began with this quote, which popped up in a Facebook post from a writer I follow: “As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book ‘splits us into two parts as we read,’ for ‘the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,’ while promising ‘perpetual union’ with another mind.” Reading, in other words, takes us outside of ourselves and gives us access to another reality. I’m neither a fan nor a scholar of Virginia Woolf, so this didn’t ring a bell, but it seemed like an intriguing idea that would be useful for a new project I’m working on (more on this at a later date). The sentence had no citation, either for Woolf or for the author quoting her, so I followed it across multiple social media accounts where other writers repeated it, and eventually found what seems to be the original source: a 2015 essay in the New Yorker, “Can Reading Make you Happier?” by Ceridwen Dovey. (newyorker.com/culture/cultur…) Dovey also doesn’t provide a source for the Woolf quotes, and obviously I wanted to read Woolf’s observations in context. But I tried searching all the usual places (Google books, JSTOR, Project Gutenberg, MUSE, Woolf collections) and found nothing. Even when I searched separately for each quotes in the sentence, all I came up with was the same Dovey essay, reproduced all across the Internet. So I asked Claude to identify each one, and instantly got my answers. It turns out that Ceridwen Dovey was splicing. The quote “splits us into two parts as we read” has nothing to do with acessing another reality through reading—or, for that matter with most kinds of reading at all. It comes from a Woolf essay called “Notes on an Elizabethan Play,” and it has, narrowly, to do with how hard it is to appreciate Elizabethan drama due to is inherent difficulties. Woolf writes: ** “But the plays of the lesser Elizabethans—Greene, Dekker, Peele, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher,—to adventure into that wilderness is for the ordinary reader an ordeal, an upsetting experience which plies him with questions, harries him with doubts, alternately delights and vexes him with pleasures and pains. For we are apt to forget, reading, as we tend to do, only the masterpieces of a bygone age how great a power the body of a literature possesses to impose itself: how it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but takes us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions principles which we had got into the habit of taking for granted, and, in fact, splits us into two parts as we read, making us, even as we enjoy, yield our ground or stick to our guns.” (en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_C…) ** This is a valid observation about Elizabethan drama. But not one that really fits Dovey’s argument. Then there’s “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” which appears in a private letter Woolf wrote to her friend Ethel Smyth in the early 1930s. The entire quote from the letter is: ** "Because, my dear Ethel, the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego; and its the ego that erects itself like another part of the body I dont dare to name.” (Virginia Woolf, Nigel Nicolson, and Joanne Trautmann Banks, The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1975, p. 319) ** Despite Dovey’s tactful condensation, this quote probably comes closest to the intention of her sentence: Woolf does indeed seem to suggest that reading requires us to let go of self-absorption. If I were going to use this for my own work, though, I’d need to go find the letter itself and read the whole thing (I might actually do that next week, but I would need to go down to William & Mary to eyeball it). And then to wrap things up, there’s the “perpetual union.” Here’s Woolf’s original quote, from her piece “The Modern Essay”—a stinging criticism of three mediocre essayists in her own day: ** Mr. Belloc and Mr. Lucas and Mr. Squire are not fiercely attached to anything in itself. They share the contemporary dilemma–that lack of an obstinate conviction which lifts ephemeral sounds through the misty sphere of anybody’s language to the land where there is a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out. (virginiawoolfproject.com/col…) ** Dovey plucks out “perpetual union” and completes it with the words “with another mind.” That’s what she wants to say, but it’s certainly not what Woolf wrote. This was a useful reminder for me: don’t use quotes cited by someone else until you go and consult the original source with your own two eyes. Too many writers cherry-pick and ignore context. And also an opportunity for me to complicate my own generally negative take on using AI for writing: AI can be the greatest search engine ever. The AI search for those quotes covered far more books and essays and articles than the standard Internet search, and when I then asked where I could find a full copy of the book/essay/article in question, I got answers. Thanks for sticking with me to the end of this long and somewhat tedious investigation!