Those little details

 Before I got out of the introduction, Eric G. Wilson convinced me that we will probably never know the color of Charles Lamb’s eyes.

The problem was the one I learned as a young reporter decades ago. Sometimes, no matter how hard you investigate, the facts just aren’t there. But more often, the inquirer finds himself with more than one account of the facts, and those accounts disagree.

And so, in the case of Lamb’s eyes, we have witnesses who say they were:

• brown.

• brownish hazel.

• one hazel and one gray flecked with red.

• grayish blue.

In my experience, the majority view is as likely to be wrong as right. The evidence suggests we just don’t know.

I like such a detail in the introduction because eye color is relatively easy. In kindergarten, we can talk about the color of our schoolmates’ eyes. The detail is a reminder: If we can’t get to certainty on such a basic thing, we’re going to have to live with uncertainty in other, more complicated, areas of a life.

• Sources: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022. For similar posts, see “It’s that kind of book,” Oct. 7,2020, and “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.