Hejinian catalogs "humanity's epistemological errors, its mistakes of knowledge, its repeated embrace of false truths, and its tendency to mistake local or temporary conditions for universal or permanent veritites" (157)
she identifies "the fundamental dilemma that characterizes the human attempt to understand, namely that we successively, and sometimes insistently, get things wrong, even while we may also be successively securing ourselves positions from which to reflect, regret, then try anew"