Losing Perspective in the Age of News

Abstract

When Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in “Experience” (1844) that “men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference,” he means that we see through our current moment by looking forward. The “art” that Emerson evokes to describe the restlessness and expansiveness of the nineteenth century is the art of perspective: we gain perspective, in other words, when we project for ourselves an image of the world in which everything takes shape in relation to something else. “All our days are so unprofitable while they pass,” says Emerson, because we orient our present toward our prospects; taking the long view “degrade[s] today” by distancing us from where we are. We retreat from our momentary positions to be part of the big picture. We want to stay relevant, but Emerson looks askance at our constant need to look toward the emerging pattern of events. “The men ask, ‘What's the news?‘” he says, “as if the old were so bad” (472).