Attention to detail …

… Boswell’s Inner Life – Anderson Valley Advertiser. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Of crucial importance was the commitment to veracity that Boswell said his father had thrashed into him. All his life he wrote down notes, if not full narratives, as soon after an event as possible. Otherwise, “one may gradually recede from the fact till all is fiction.” A modern critic has coined a term for the result: “the fact imagined.” In an early journal Boswell found an apt metaphor for the telling details he wanted to preserve: “In description we omit insensibly many little touches which give life to objects. With how small a speck does a painter give life to an eye!”