hubris
If we give meanings to our actions, such as things like putting a comma or crossing out a sentence, we may end up feeling grand and glorious.
'If editing is about grief, it is so because scholarship in general is about loss... in the face of overwhelming loss, one starts to catalogue what one has, to search for origins, to remember and value antecendents... Grief is the process of coming to terms with absence, and this process has several stages. In its earliest stages it involves denial and idealisation: the mourner urges the dead not to be dead; the mourner invents rather than recalls, the mourner creates the person mourned, the mourner remembers. Recovery is signalled by paradox: grieving and celebrating, looking back while planning foward, remembering and forgetting. The task in recovery is not to reduce these oppositions to singularity as did Heminge and Condell, ..., but to enable them to co-exist. Editing is, it seems, a matter of life and death'.
--Laurie E. Maguire on Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)