"Truly, though our element is time," said the English poet Philip Larkin, "we are not suited to the long perspectives/ Open at each instant of our lives./ They link us to our losses."

Funny about those long perspectives. We are addicted to them and yet, as Larkin suggested, we don't handle them very well. Anyone doubting that must not have been reading the papers lately. Two news stories last week gave evidence of our simultaneous longing to know where we came from (and where we might be going) and our ability to botch the answers. Sometimes it's hard not to suspect that the intensity of the longing contributes to the magnitude of the mistakes.

First came the stunning confession by one of Japan's leading archaeologists that he had faked an internationally significant find in Miyagi Prefecture last month. A team to which Mr. Shinichi Fujimura belonged claimed to have unearthed at the Kamitakamori site stone tools dating back as much as 700,000 years -- a claim that, if substantiated, would have helped boost arguments for an earlier, rather than later, date for the start of the Japanese Paleolithic Period. At the time, team members were quoted as saying that the tools belonged to roughly the same period as China's Peking Man and would serve as "precious materials in the search for the roots of the Japanese people."