The people who live on this planet have finite resources and a finite amount of time, but there are many who do not see the bigger picture. Most people seek immediate satisfaction despite knowing this information. The reason this happens is because their perspective of the world is incomplete and not drawn from a fuller understanding. Authors DuBois and Emerson demonstrate in their writings that not all things are as they seem; not nature, and not the other people they live around.
In Ralph Emerson’s Nature, he starts by saying that time is “retrospective”, constantly evolving and changing as the newer generations of people come in and experience life for themselves. As he writes through Nature, it appears as though most of his writing has a heavy emphasis on this perspective viewpoint. An evolving perspective persists throughout Nature and is expressed in a multitude of ways. In Chapter I of his writing he describes the process of a man in isolation, yet never in a state of solitude. Given the right tools at their disposal, a person can truly see nature around them as it really is, and not how it is perceived by most. This insight gives readers the ability to understand the significance of his argument of retrospective; it provides a fair amount of description to how the perspective mind works and what allows a person to truly persevere.
While Emerson highlights the importance and the positive effects of perspective, the opposite can be said for W.E.B DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk. His words in writing appear to be intentionally vague, operating in a way to be open to interpretation through the use of rhetoric and question. One thing is clear about his writing, and it is the experience of racism and the struggles of people of color. In his first chapter, he recollects memories from when he was a boy, and the sudden realization that he was unlike the other boys due to an encounter with a new girl in town that refused his card. That life-changing moment was able to change DuBoi’s understanding of what it means to be a black boy in a city that hates him and his own people.
DuBois lived in a time where his country did not take kindly to people of color, and in Chapter I of The Souls of Black Folk, he recollects moments of pride whenever he outperformed his peers and in those moments, saw himself in a more pleasant light. However, the people around him sought to bring him down, altering his perspective, and the minds of other black youth around him as they continued to be oppressed.
Both of these authors articulate the importance of perspective in vastly different ways, but overall achieve the same goal of enhancing the reader’s knowledge on how the world is perceived and how the world is in reality. In this dual world, it may become difficult to ascertain the difference between reality and envisioning. But, the important takeaway is that one must be wary of these two worlds and set them apart from one another.
